BLEEPED WORDS, HATE SPEECH, AND TOLERANCE ON THE AIRWAVES

By Brad Kava, SJ Mercury News - Ear (column); Tuesday, June 12, 2001

Contact Brad Kava at bkava@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5040; fax (408) 271-3786.

What the bleep is going on?

If you've been listening carefully to the radio the past few weeks, you've noticed a lot of bleeped-out words. Not in the usual places, on the shock-jock shows, but in the last place you'd expect to hear profanities -- in the commercials.

On one, by the California avocado growers that I heard aired during daytime KGO-AM (810) talk shows, a woman says she can be a "real bleep" about giving out her avocado recipes. The word she is implying is hard to miss. (The growers edited the ad this week, after complaints.)

Another, on alternative KITS-FM (105.3) features a child asking about a strangely named concert tour, playing at Great America theme park, "What the bleep is the Rebelli-ache tour?" the pre-adolescent voice asks.

Finally, in an ad for Popeye's, a local piercing shop, aired during Howard Stern's KITS-FM show on a station with a large teenage audience, a woman talks about having both sides of her "yum-yum" pierced, so they click when she's doing aerobics.

It's reached the point where companies have to do anything they can to stand out over the long desolate stretches of ads.

The odd thing is that it wasn't long ago that national advertisers pulled out of shows that aired questionable content.

McCann-Erickson media buyer John Currillo remembers when a shopping chain executive pulled ads off a show because they were aired adjacent to a pubic-hair shaving contest.

An editorial in the trade magazine Radio Ink recalled how shocking it was in 1968 to hear the word "damn" aired. Now, it's not the least bit shocking, says KGO operations manager Jack Swanson.

And on TV, notes Los Angeles advertising executive Paul Izenstark, you can see an Ikea ad that features voyeurism and a sadomasochistic, whip-bearing couple.

The irony here is that last week the FCC announced a $7,000 fine against a Colorado radio station that played an edited version of the rapper Eminem's song "The Real Slim Shady," a song that was all over MTV and sold millions of copies.

The fine is part of a crackdown not just on words, but on innuendo.

"The public is outraged by the increasingly coarse content aired on radio and television at all hours of the day," said former FCC commissioner Susan Ness, who resigned June 1.

What we are seeing here is a government agency that has as much chance of stemming the flood of so-called profanity as the record companies have of shutting down free music on the Internet or the Highway Patrol has of enforcing a 55-mph speed limit.

As a result, the FCC's efforts to regulate profanity on the public's airwaves are arbitrary, an attempt to use publicity to try to stem the tide.

To actually and fairly enforce the regulations as they are interpreted now, it would have to fine almost every radio station every day, destroying any notion of free speech.

KGO host Ronn Owens took on the issue last week, using an unbleeped four-letter word as an act of defiance. His point was that the FCC fines have a chilling effect on all expression of controversial ideas.

The real profanity

That is more profane than innuendoes on a pop-music album or bleeped-out commercials.

In Sacramento, an organization of Asian-American groups has taken the lead against several hate-talkers, including KSFO-AM's now nationally syndicated Michael Savage. Rather than asking for FCC help, they have sent letters to advertisers and picketed the Sacramento station, KSTE, which airs the show.

Calling the Chinese "little devils," Savage called for dropping nuclear weapons on the country and said that Chinese-Americans should be put in internment camps if they wouldn't sign loyalty oaths.

"It goes far beyond ridiculing a certain ethnic group or calling names or making a certain group the brunt of jokes," says Georgette Imura, part of a Sacramento group called CAPITAL (the Council of Asian Pacific Islanders Together for Advocacy and Leadership at 5665 Freeport Blvd., Suite 2, Sacramento 95822).

"What it does is send a message to misguided folks that it's OK to act and talk that way. Our fear is that this will lead to acts of violence or discrimination."

Swanson, who aired Savage's show for five years with relatively few complaints, was surprised to hear that the host passed muster in the liberal Bay Area but was being challenged in more conservative Sacramento.

Tolerant populace

Or maybe they are just too busy to think they can do something about it.

"We don't want to get into free-speech issues," says Imura. "Instead, we are going to hit them in the pocketbook."

And that may be more effective than any token enforcement the government can come up with.

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