He was transformed from the rude and raunchy enemy of minimal decency, to the bad boy with the sweet center and family values. However, based on Stern’s most recent press, one might conclude that Pat Boone in his leather heavy metal getup poses more of a menace.Īmid a hailstorm of friendly interviews and critical praise in the weeks surrounding the March opening of his autobiographical move, ‘Private Parts,’ Stern’s image was respun. ‘This man is a racist, period,’ says Westcott, who provided the African American Business Association with the 488 pages of radio transcripts of Stern’s riffs on race it needed to press its case against Infinity. ‘Just because Stern says it’s satire doesn’t make it true,’ says Westcott, himself a long-haired, expletive-undeleted character, whose day job is managing a plant that sells ostrich meat (‘the other red meat’). ‘Stern is a satirist.’Īnd Lerman, a regular listener adds, ‘Most people who complain about Stern don’t listen and don’t know what they’re talking about.’īut Al Westcott, an obsessive listener from Southern California who is most responsible for the indecency complaints against Stern that eventually led Infinity to pay $1.7 million in 1995 to the Treasury, dismisses the notion of Stern as any relation to Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor. and now (since Infinity’s purchase by Westinghouse-CBS) for the CBS Radio Group for whom Stern works. ‘Howard Stern doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,’ says Steven Lerman, counsel to Infinity Broadcasting Corp.
In a nation that seems forever bollixed about how to talk about race, let alone joke about it, Howard Stern has in recent weeks made the leap to a new level of national celebrity without ever having to seriously confront the questions debated, and ultimately sidestepped, in the musty confines of the FCC a few years ago: When it comes to race, is Howard Stern a savage satirist or a shameless panderer? But to those who defend Stern from the charge of racism, irony is everything. That $750,000 of Stern’s profits should be used to train black broadcasters is, to be sure, ironic. It could also be called the Howard Stern School of Broadcasting because it was created entirely with money paid by Stern’s employer to settle a complaint, lodged by a local black business group with the Federal Communications Commission, charging that Stern’s hugely popular radio show was ‘virulently racist.’
WASHINGTON - Just above Georgetown, in a non-descript brick office complex that is home to insurers and lawyers and Latin American military attaches, there is a place known as the African American Media Incubator, dedicated to training black men and women in every aspect of the radio business.
0 kommentar(er)
