Forget Stern, Here’s a Real Obscenity

Why all the agonized hand-wringing and profound philosophizing and super-heated political discussion about “shock jock” Howard Stern and whether the FCC should punish him and/or his employers in some way (“Broadcasters Divided Over Backing Stern,” Calendar, Dec. 19)?

For weeks I’ve been confused, thinking either I’m misreading the title so gratuitously conferred upon him or the people using it have left out one letter. Why not just call him schlock jock--without the quotation marks--which is what he is? Some suitable agency could be convened to crown Stern the King of Schlock and be done with it.

Undoubtedly this schlockmeister’s already super-inflated ego would then swell to the bursting point and he’d explode and the whole stupid debate would go away, allowing us to go back to more useful pursuits.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The Stern affair is one more piece of evidence that Gresham’s Law in economics (remember Econ 101--bad money drives out the good?) applies inexorably and with equal force to our mass-media culture. Given the choice between presumed high-brow cultural fare and schlock, major segments of the mass audience will choose the Howard Sterns.

Not that the audience is to blame. It’s the media moguls, relentless in their pursuit of the largest audience and the highest ratings (read biggest profits), who systematically force-feed the public with schlock programming to create and cultivate the lowest common denominator of public taste.

By itself, the Stern affair would be too farcical to waste time discussing if not for the bigger issue: the continuing degradation of television’s responsibility to inform and educate, to serve the people through news and public affairs programming. A case in point is the near-total capture of the recent presidential campaign by the pack of jackals who call themselves talk show hosts. (If you don’t have a dictionary, the jackal is an animal that feeds on carrion--decayed and rotting meat.)

When the talk showmen essentially took coverage of the election campaign away from the traditional political press, their success was widely touted as a triumph for expansion of the political process through direct audience involvement. While that may have been one partial side-effect, the talk showmen succeeded in further corrupting the political debate through their ignorance and gross oversimplification of the issues. Recall the House check furor that nobody ever succeeded in putting back into rational perspective once the jackals got through gorging on it.

Whether Stern’s program is indecent or simply trash, whether it deserves the protection of the First Amendment can be debated endlessly with neither side ever persuading the other. The real obscenity is the abdication of responsibility by major networks and local stations with their record of repeated cutbacks in staffing and facilities and in commitment to their legally mandated obligation to render public service.

What we get is car chases, frivolity and froth in seven-second sound bites instead of serious discussion of the public’s real concerns.

In sum: Should Howard Stern be reined in? Is it a First Amendment issue? Who cares, when the bigger question--who will tell the people what they need to know--never even gets on the public agenda?