Stern fans and friends of free speech- ready to get the FCC out of the business of regulating broadcast speech?

I enjoy Stern in small amounts, but his "frank talk" is overshadowed by a lot of rude talk, to me, he's like Aristotle with Tourette's Syndrome.

I agree---Stern is best when he isn't working XXX non stop. There's no telling what his show will be like on Satellite. I will miss him having to dance around certain words, since now he'll be able to just blurt them out. I think that's part of the fun of his show; the inability to say everything.

That's true. His famed messing with the FCC and station management over the use of certain words was great entertainment and a key to his success. The tension made it so. The five areas of tension made the show: Stern's marriage, his relationship with his parents, station management, the cast of the show itself, and the FCC.

His dealing with his wife was fascinating. He had to dance around being the family man and faithful husband while having people get naked to be judged, interviewing Playboy playmates, and generally having a teen-aged boy's sexual hyper-fascination.

The show suffered after Jackie left, again after Stern's divorce, and probably will suffer again when he is out of the grasp of the FCC, as the tension will be gone.

At least he can still play the "I told you not to be stupid, you moron" clip.

"He had to dance around being the family man and faithful husband while having people get naked to be judged, interviewing Playboy playmates, and generally having a teen-aged boy's sexual hyper-fascination."

Which, in a teen age boy is undertandable, or laughable, but in a 45 year old man...?

What I do think is that Satellite radio will put the nail in the coffin of network broadcast radio. When I was in West Twexas, SatRad would have been a welcome alternative to the farm reports, and I will probably get it when I return to the US for the convenience. It will allow me to hear whatI want, and new stuff I might like, all without the payola-laden taint of corporate radio.

Thanks and welcome, Matt! I think the move is perfect for him as he will be "liberated" to do pretty much whatever he wants and it is great fro satellite radio. It's like picking up a top free agent in sports: it isn't just what that individual brings, but it also signals the franchise is serious (no pun intended) and makes it a lot easier t obring in other top players. It signals the same to the audience.

Sirius stock went through the roof after the announcement. I expect this was mostly a play by them to become more competitive with XM.

Stern now has another year and change to talk up Sirius before he actually moves there in 2006.

But I think that he will flop there, because overt pornographic radio is less compelling that the tacit smuttiness of his current show...

I don't know how pornographic the show will get. Obviously foul language will be in play, but I don't expect Stern to start banging strippers on the show.

Lack of FCC regulation is what's driving Stern off to satellite radio.

The FCC is gradually dropping its earlier mandate, giving up any pretense of keeping the public airwaves public, and letting the broadcast spectrum fall under the control of a few giant media corporations. This shift is being quite effectively covered up with distracting debates over just how much the FCC ought to be regulating indecency.

Stern's fans like to think of him as free speech's canary in the coal mine. His detractors don't much mind his misfortunes. But every word these two groups waste on arguing against each other is more energy that did not get directed against the real forces that threaten our freedom of expression.

If anyone actually bought his story about moving to satellite for the "freedom" when he first started spouting it... I'd think twice now...

Howard Stern has been in full douchebag mode for the past month and it seems as though he's finally destroyed the last shred of credibility he might have had left. These are some of his quotes in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly,

"I was just at my psychiatrist and I said, `I just got great news: We hit the 4 million mark. And I'm angry. It should be 20 million"

"It's insulting to me that everyone hasn't come with me. I take it personally,"
"I want to say to my audience ... `You haven't come with me yet? How dare you? We're up to wild, crazy stuff, the show has never sounded better. You cheap bastard!'"

So, in the name of "freedom" you take you show off free radio and take over $600 million dollars to go to satellite? To be "free", you need to be paid $600+ million dollars and your fans need to spend a hundred or a few hundred bucks on a radio as well as a monthly subscription? Then you take your show off E!, so you can be more free... also so your fans can pay even more subscription fees to watch your show in pay per view?

Where do you get off, being a man who just got paid $600 million, calling your fans cheap for paying to hear you? Maybe if you'd done some interesting radio in the past 10 years, people may have actually followed you. By your own admission, your show was "subpar". Awww... The few hundred million you were making a year then wasn't enough for you to put out some effort? Oh yeah, you weren't "free" enough... because you care about freedom. You care about the government telling someone they can't say something, you care about an employer telling you not to say something.. or do you?

If you really cared about any of that, you wouldn't have(by your own admission) forced your bosses at CBS to forbid Opie & Anthony to talk about you. What was your quote again? "I'm a strong supporter of MY free speech." You don't care about free speech. You care about money, which that's fine with me. Make as much money as you'd like. However, don't go spouting off all this hypocritical garbage about free speech. You aren't doing something noble. You are no crusader. That much is obvious.