CONTENTS PAGE

Section 2 - Article Three

Censorship: A Patriotic Oxymoron

Censoring Politically Charged Entertainment

The United States Constitution allows Americans to make their own decisions about careers, religion, and political beliefs. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees the government will not abridge people’s freedom of speech or that of the press.(1)

However, these constitutional guarantees are not without certain limitations. These are on the grounds of sedition, obscenity, libel and slander. But what constitutes any of these limitations is a judgement call dependent on an individual’s particular values and this fact has led the Supreme Court to create amorphous definitions of each exception.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines patriotism as, “love for or devotion to one’s country.”(2) The First Amendment is a prided patriotic possession taught to children at an early age. But patriotism is also a tricky concept to specifically define. Where one person may feel it their patriotic duty to exercise their freedom of speech to protest a war waged by the U.S., another might see the same action as treasonous. Regardless of the latter perspective though, Americans have the right to dissent openly and non-violently.

Patriotic feelings are often strongest during times of war and many opportunistic politicians have exploited patriotism to attack their opponents, accusing them of un-American behavior.

The air of perpetual war that has existed in the U.S. throughout the Cold War, the neoconservatives’ continuing cultural war since the fall of Communism and now the War on Terror have aided many political opportunists to seize power and eliminate deliberative democracy because it appeals only to a visceral negative emotion (that is, angry patriotism), rather than to voters’ reasoned views on policy.

To suppress views just because they are controversial is unconstitutional. Ironically though there have been many instances where support for censorship was riled through visceral patriotic appeals such as Clear Channels’ list of over one hundred fifty songs not to play after 9/11 due to questionable lyrics, from Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” to “Jump” by Van Halen;(3) or it was enacted under thinly-guised, politically-motivated grounds by censoring due to indecency such as the current case of Clear Channel dumping Howard Stern from six of its radio stations after exorbitant fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).(4)

Bill Hicks and Howard Stern are two entertainers who were censored by different means but censored because of the nature of their political commentary. While Hicks dealt with venues and broadcasters refusing to let him perform to avoid potential controversy, Stern was dropped by the largest owner of radio stations due to actions taken by the FCC on grounds of indecency. Both men expressed very strong views against a president Bush. Stern is against the re-election of George W. Bush and Hicks was against the re-election of George H.W. Bush as well as military action in Iraq during the Gulf War.

William Melvin Hicks
Bill Hicks was inspired by comedians at an early age and listened to the sets of Woody Allen, Steve Martin and Ed Bluestein religiously as he grew up in suburban Houston in the 1970s. He received a strict Baptist upbringing and was infuriated by the American dream, “where you got married, moved to the suburbs, set the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees, expressed your creativity through your yard work, and played the same song on the piano for thirty years.”(5)

Hicks snuck out of his house to perform in nightclubs in Houston and had become a local celebrity before the age of eighteen. By 1986, Hicks was touring clubs all over the U.S. and made three appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Hicks always included social commentary in his performances, but as his work progressed he became more and more vehement about dismantling politics, religion and culture. His directness and edginess began to make problems for his managers to get him booked in Reaganite America, and his performance simply would not fly on The Late Show even though they desired a performer who could blow the roof off as Hicks could. The hilarity of Hicks’ performance may have been due to how successfully he illustrated truth about America, but such talk was not to be allowed on network television.

The first time Hicks conceded to allowing someone to censor his act came when he agreed to perform on The Late Show. Hicks felt the trade necessary to obtain the national exposure he desired. He performed his material in front of an executive from NBC’s Standards and Practices department who would not permit jokes about religion, schizophrenia or the handicapped. Anyone familiar with Hicks’ work knows the comedian wove politics, religion and culture together in a brilliant, intricate fashion and, “The demand from network television for a quick, witty spray of set-up-punch-line fare seemed designed, however insidiously, to abbreviate anything approaching actual social commentary.”(6)

To not permit a comedian to discuss religion in 1986 as Pat Robertson campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination and the televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker reached millions of Americans daily through the Praise The Lord ministry network while collecting tax free donations, was to forbid any commentary on a very significant cross-section of the American cultural-political landscape.

During this same period, a number of venues began to cancel Hicks’ live gigs for, “fear of offending patrons.”(7) When Hicks’ performance in Jimmy Swaggart’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana was shut down, he remarked that he wanted to go there to promote the idea of freedom of speech and by shutting down the performance, “he was acting against precisely what we were fighting for.”(8)

Comedy Clubs in the 1980s were a place for juggling acts and flatulence jokes, not venues for serious social commentary. Many venues across the country began to refuse to permit the comedian to perform for fear of offending their audiences. Hicks responded:

The material is never offensive. It can be perceived by narrow-minded people as such. A lot of people are preaching fear these days and I don’t believe in that at all. So I target these people and they soon stand up and walk out, as they watch their extremely fragile world view crumble to the laughter of people around them.(9)

As the traditional outlets for comedians began to close for Hicks, there were people desperate to help him get exposure that were aware of his incredible talent. They saw a connection between the atmosphere created by Hicks’ performance and that of a rock concert and began to book him in jazz rooms and rock clubs in their search for an uncensored venue.

With the outbreak of the Gulf War in the beginning of 1991, many comedians avoided the subject. As comedian Eric Bogosian stated:

One of the top comedians in this country told me during the Iraq War that they couldn’t do it. They said they wouldn’t put their neck on the line. They were against the war and they wouldn’t say anything because they basically felt that you watch those little bags of money just fly away. It’s like kiss your career goodbye.(10)

Hicks appeared that July at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, Canada at The Centaur, the most prestigious theatre in the city, with a full repertoire on the Gulf War. It was based on the concept of “The Evolution of Myth”. In designing the show Hicks remarked, “The world appears to us a certain way because we believe it to be that way. When we change our beliefs, the world will change as well.”(11) His performance was a sensation that sold out six shows and the festival added a seventh.

Hicks went on to perform eleven shows at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival in Scotland again with his scathing material on current politics, American culture, sex, drugs and the Gulf War that Channel Four in the U.K. broadcast a taping of in January, 1992. Hicks became a superstar in the U.K. He returned to play sold out shows across Britain and at London’s Dominion Theatre.

Hicks’ welcome home after playing the two thousand-seat Dominion in London was to play the Laff Stop in Austin holding one-tenth the people and to appear on Austin Cable Television. But the event that granted him the most widespread American publicity occurred shortly thereafter.

On October 1st, 1993, Hicks made his twelfth and final appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman at its new set where Hicks performed on the same stage where Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show filmed from the waist up.

Hicks’ material passed the Standards and Practice approval and he performed a set that met thunderous applause and laughter. When the show aired that evening however, Hicks’ performance was removed. This was the first time ever that a performer was completely excised from the show.

According to Hicks on his last aired interview, United States of Advertising, a right-to-life group purchased advertisement to air that same night as Hicks’ performance was to be shown. One of Hicks’ jokes was about right-to-lifers, and he believed the offended audience would not be people at home, but the right-to-life organization that purchased the advertising slot.

Regardless, the censorship by The Late Show obtained more media attention for Hicks than his previous eleven appearances. Next month’s issue of The New Yorker featured an article by critic John Lahr on the comedian’s continuous inability to reach a broad audience in the U.S., “The Goat Boy Rises”.

Before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in February, 1994, Bill Hicks was a sensation in Australia and the U.K. but was still eluded by any considerable mainstream success in his own country. Although there were serious messages in Hicks’ comedy, he could not understand the rejection from television. They were just jokes.

When questioned why Bill Hicks never reached a wide audience in the U.S., comedian Doug Stanhope responded, “If you are popular with mainstream America, you're doing something wrong or they just don't get it. You're asking why they don't have a sushi bar at Wal-Mart.”(12)

Regardless of such cynical perspectives, Hicks is one of the influential figures that proved comedy could be used in a powerful and serious way to inform as well as entertain. Hicks was the performer that sought out alternative venues for comedy as the traditional ones closed up to him just as news has sought out alternative outlets with the compromising of traditional sources.

Howard Stern
While comedy venues and network censors acted independently to keep Bill Hicks off stage or to strictly regulate what he said on air, the FCC took direct actions in 2004 to force further self-censorship on broadcasters.

Clear Channel, Inc. benefited greatly by the deregulation of media ownership enacted by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In the U.S., the corporation owns 1,200 plus radio stations, operates 60% of all rock programming, and boasts 103,000,000 radio listeners.

In the mid-1970s, the FCC still demanded, “strict adherence to the [1949] Fairness Doctrine as the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest – the sine qua non for grant for renewal of license.”(13) But the Reagan-appointed FCC of 1987 adopted a different perspective. Mark Fowler, the FCC chairman at that time, believed that, “the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.”(14)

The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which required equal air time for opposing points of view, in favor of programming of a strictly competitive business nature now permits broadcasters such as Clear Channel to air Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and, until recently, Howard Stern as often as desired with no necessity to consider the points of view of any of these hosts, or to air opposing perspectives, as long as listeners continued to tune in daily and advertisers paid for airtime.

However, after Janet Jackson’s breast-exposing incident during the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, the FCC enacted a new policy affecting the issuing of fines and of license renewal.


FCC Chairman Michael Powell says his agency received over 200,000 complaints about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl controversy, helping prompt the commission to begin issuing fines per incident, rather than per program. It may also start revoking broadcast licenses for repeat offenders.(15)


Two weeks after Chairman Powell announced this new policy, the Chief Operating Officer of Clear Channel, Mark Mays, announced the corporation’s new “Responsible Broadcasting Initiative”. Clear Channel’s new policy states the corporation will, “suspend any DJ in question, and perform a swift investigation. If we or the government determine the offending broadcast is indecent, the DJ will be terminated without delay.”(16)

In late February of this year, Stern had Rick Salomon, the man filmed having sex with hotel heiress Paris Hilton, on his show. The interview featured discussion of anal sex and a caller used a racial epithet on air.

The FCC responded by fining Clear Channel $27,500 for the eighteen indecency infractions for a total of $495,000. Clear Channel’s response was to dump the Howard Stern Show from its six stations in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Rochester, San Diego, Pittsburgh and Louisville.

Fines for Stern’s show are nothing new. The Center for Public Integrity estimates that of the $4 million dollars in fines issued by the FCC since 1990, Howard Stern has received roughly half.(17) However, Stern’s employer Infinity Broadcasting has paid the fines as Stern attracts over 8 million listeners every week. Stern’s fans are predominantly young males, a demographic which advertisers are willing to pay respectively to reach.

A nearly half-million dollar fine from the FCC and no promise from the Howard Stern Show to change its style are strong reasons for Clear Channel to drop the show, and that is the corporation’s prerogative. But the true controversy is that this is a business decision being forced on Clear Channel by the FCC and that the FCC appears to have a double-standard in determining indecency.

Howard Stern affirms on his website the FCC enacts a double-standard by comparing the transcript from a typical Stern show and a recent transcript of The Oprah Winfrey Show where there are graphic descriptions of sex parties and various sexual activities. While the shock jock posts a transcript of a respectively tame show to compare to Oprah, it does prove the point made very clearly by Viacom’s(18) President and Chief Operating Officer during his testimony before Congress in February:

The problem, we believe, is the current vagueness of how indecency is defined, and it’s exasperated by the lack of clear policy direction from the FCC. Is the standard in Las Vegas the same standard that’s appropriate in Salt Lake City?(19)

As it exists now, the FCC determines a broadcast in violation when:

An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; And the material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.(20)

Even though the government has never been practicably capable of defining indecency, the recent actions taken against the Howard Stern Show have a greater relevance in accordance with their timing.

While Howard Stern is an obvious celebrity to go after if the FCC wishes to make an example for others to be wary of potentially lewd remarks, the actions taken against him are too coincidentally timed with the reversal of Stern’s outspoken views of President George W. Bush, and his call to over 8 million listeners to vote Bush out of office, to be ignored. It is also too coincidental for a company, “known for allowing animals to be killed live on the air, severing long-standing ties with the community and charity events, laying off thousands of workers, homogenizing playlists,” and whose, “top two executives are close political and financial supporters of George W. Bush,” to consider Clear Channel’s Responsible Broadcasting Initiative was used indiscriminately against Stern to protect its listeners from indecencies.(21)

Stern originally supported Bush’s military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but began to attack the president early this year for his stance on stem cell research, gay marriage, and his National Guard duty during the Vietnam Conflict.

The FCC attacking the Clear Channel stations, which carried Stern’s show in Pennsylvania and Florida, two key swing states(22) is also too coincidental to outrightly dismiss.

The FCC made a profound extension of its power to influence broadcasters’ content decisions in February by not only increasing the amount it can fine a station from $27,500 to $275,000, but also opting to fine a station per indecency within a broadcast as opposed to the previous practice of fining a station per broadcast in which an indecency occurred. This is still light treatment compared to the legislation passed by the House of Representatives. If this legislation passes the Senate, it will permit the FCC to fine a station $500,000 per indecency per broadcast and revoke that station’s license if it is found guilty of three indecency violations.(23)

In spite of this attempt to increase the punishment for broadcasting an indecency to draconian levels, no revision to the ambiguous definition of indecency has been proposed. Chairman Michael Powell of the FCC said, “You don’t want the government to write red book of what the government says you can and cannot say.”(24)

One of the only twenty-two representatives to vote against the bill to increase FCC fines, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), remarked, “We run a great risk when our legislation threatens to undermine both our Constitution and our creativity. The stakes are high and the threat to free speech is all too real.”(25)

Indecent material is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned. If the FCC were to define indecency clearly and distinctly, it would almost certainly prove unconstitutional. But as it remains ambiguous, it serves as a tool for the FCC to pick and choose who and what to attack.

Entertaining Free Speech
The bulwarks put before these two performers to freely express themselves on major broadcast outlets in the U.S., while they are proven economically viable entertainers, illustrates the power and relevance of political humor. New Yorker comedian Richard Jeni sees the power of political humor in that:

Comedians are one of the few people around who really have license to tell the truth. You know. Movies don’t really have it. Certainly television personalities don’t really have it. Comedians do because ultimately they’re only responsible to themselves. They’re not responsible to a studio or a network or a corporate entity…And for that reason they have probably more license to tell the truth than anybody.(26)

Comedians have the ability to call warmongers “warmongers” and do not need to take the protocol of referring to them as hawks. The Daily Show can say, “You weren’t elected,” when George W. Bush speaks of re-election. Much political humor and left-leaning infotainment is necessary to counter the conservative echo chamber of political pundits and conservative talk radio hosts.

Entertainment is now the forum for serious political debate in the U.S. as traditional news outlets, which attempt to be or just wear a façade of objectivity as with Fox News’, “We report. You decide.” are compromised by: their necessity to maximize sales; their reliance on official sources such as government/business press releases; their ownership by six major companies; the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine to allow equal air time to opposing points of view; the myth of liberal media bias; and the baiting of mainstream media by an issue reverberating in the right-wing echo chamber of radio talk shows and websites, and then accusing mainstream media of ignoring the issue.

Comedians and entertainment news are essential to counter-balance people's perspectives as politics is not about issues, but about image. When Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry made his first public appearance with running mate John Edwards, Kerry stated the Democratic ticket has, “better vision, better ideas,” and that, “we’ve got better hair.”(27) The year before Kerry made this remark, an Austrian-born actor who had never previously held a public office was elected to head the nation’s most populous state, the world’s fifth-largest economy, and the greatest influence on presidential elections. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California spouts, “I’ll be back,” “Terminate them,” and other one-liners from his action films, “onto the California Legislature like a bumper sticker.”(28)

The use of such language to win public approval might be ridiculous, but it appears to work. And the relevance of the FCC taking action to silence outspoken entertainers vocal about politics is profound in light of the fact that films appear to have such an immense effect on Americans’ perspective of what makes a good leader. Entertainers are often influential political figures whether they are on air, on screen, on stage or in office.

Further relevance of political humor and infotainment is supported by a recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that finds:

Young people, by far the hardest to reach segment of the political news audience, are abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets, including comedy shows such as the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, as their source for election news.(29)

Comedian Doug Stanhope’s analogy of politics in the U.S. is an appropriate metaphor if one accepts politics is based more on image than issue.

Politics is sports to most folk. They were raised to root for a team - Rep or Demo - and will root for their team to win using whatever nonsense issue or personal attack as fodder to make themselves feel part of the game. If you're talking to a Red Sox fan, you'll always get a Hooray by saying the Yankees suck but it doesn’t mean you’re discussing the game of baseball.(30)

Truth has been relegated to the realm of entertainment as the journalistic responsibility to be an objective watchdog of government and business has been severely compromised under the pressure of a competitive market. The traditional news outlets’ practice of objective presentation also compromises a reader’s ability to question a report as it does not forward information as skewed one way or another.

Columnist David Shaw of The Los Angeles Times argues that when people complain about bias in the news, “what they’re really complaining about, whether they’re on the left or the right, is that the news isn’t biased in favor of their side of the argument.”(31)

Perhaps an increasing number of young adults obtaining their information from The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live is not a complete travesty. Is it possibly a more dangerous news habit to accept broadcast news as utterly unbiased and objective as opposed to consuming overtly satirical news?

Columnist Patt Morrison of The Los Angeles Times believes entertainment news can serve an equally important role as traditional news outlets to keep people informed:

I think those are probably more useful, insofar as so many people say they get their information exclusively from television. That sometimes these places, in trying to make a joke or an entertaining point, put on bits of information that you may not find otherwise.(32)

Her point above coincides with the reality that an entire issue cannot be completely explained by a news report either. In response to a disgruntled reader, Morrison stated, “Look. I write a column. I write 800 words. I don’t write the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am trying to give a glimpse and an idea from which you as a citizen are responsible for finding out more.”(33)

The First Amendment, patriotism and censorship create a very strange triad. While American children are taught at an early age that one of the things that makes the country great is their freedom to speak their point of view and the press’s freedom to do the same, it is on the grounds of protecting children from dangerous, indecent subjects and language that restrictions and punishments to free speech are expanding.

The argument here is not that traditional news is useless or that political humor and forms of infotainment are entirely better outlets of information than the traditional news sources. The argument is that journalism has been severely compromised in its ability to function as a public trust when it must operate first as a competitive industry; that political humor and infotainment have the freedom to say whatever, however; and that its relevance as an electoral motivator and influence on issues is powerful enough that substantial measures are being taken to find ways to selectively silence this form of expression within the United States.

1. Ref. 38, U.S. House of Representatives, p. 1
2. Ref. 19, Merriam-Webster Online, np
3. Ref. 27, Rock Dirt, 2001, np
4. Ref. 4, Baird, 2004, p. 1
5. Ref. 36, True, 2002, p. 24
6. ibid p. 100
7. ibid p. 108
8. ibid p. 108
9. ibid p. 113
10. Ref. 35, Bould, 1994, np
11. Ref. 36, True, 2002, p. 165
12. Stanhope 2004, interview, Appendix A: 50
13. Ref. 1, Alterman, 2004, p. 71
14. ibid p. 71
15. Ref. 25, PBS NewsHour, 2004, np
16. Ref. 11, ClearChannel.com, 2004, p. 1
17. Ref. 17, Lepage, 2004, np
18. Viacom owns Infinity Broadcasting.
19. Ref. 25, PBS NewsHour, 2004, np
20. Ref. 14, FCC, 2004, np
21. Ref. 7, Brock, 2004, p. 307-308
22. A state to potentially vote either Republican or Democrat.
23. Ref. 10, Chicago Tribune, 2004, p. 26
24. Ref. 6, Boliek, 2004, np
25. Ref. 10, Chicago Tribune, 2004, p. 26
26. Ref. 35, Bould, 2001, np
27. Ref. 33, Sidoti, 2004, np
28. Ref. 21, Morrison, 2004, np
29. Ref. 24, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2004, p. 1
30. Stanhope 2004, interview, Appendix A: 49
31. Ref. 32, Shaw, 2004, np
32. Morrison 2004, interview, Appendix B: 57
33. Morrison 2004, interview, Appendix B: 60

to REFLECTION & CONCLUSION