Other Stations Won’t Be Fined for Airing Stern, FCC Says

After serving notice late Thursday on four Infinity Broadcasting Corp. stations that they could be fined $500,000 for broadcasting allegedly indecent material on Howard Stern’s program, the Federal Communications Commission turned around Friday and said flatly that it was not pursuing cases against other stations that air him.

“This is the end of it,” replied Robert H. Ratcliffe, assistant chief for law at the FCC’s mass media bureau, when asked whether other stations that carry Stern might also be liable.

This appears to take Stern’s Los Angeles outlet, KLSX-FM (97.1), off the hook, at least in this latest round of anti-Stern actions by the regulatory agency. The station, which is owned by Greater Media Inc. in New Jersey, is No. 1 in the market during the key morning-drive hours with Stern’s show.

The Infinity stations were cited because Infinity produces Stern’s syndicated show and has “exhibited a pattern of apparent misconduct involving indecent broadcasts in the past,” the FCC said, referring to a series of censure and fines against the program.

The latest double-whammy against Stern began Wednesday when the FCC filed a notice of liability against WFBI-FM in Pahrump, Nev., for $73,750, based on a complaint from a Las Vegas listener. The cited material took up 19 pages of transcript. WFBI is owned by Los Angeles-based Americom.

Then on Thursday, potential levies of $125,000 apiece were issued against four stations owned by Infinity over the same material cited in the Nevada case: WXRK-FM in New York, where the Stern show originates, WYSP-FM in Philadelphia, WJFK-FM in Manassas, Va., and WJFK-AM in Baltimore. The stations have 30 days to reply before the fines are imposed.

Infinity’s response Friday, through Washington attorney Steven Lerman, was low-key. “We’re going to study (the notice). We’ll submit a response in due course presenting our point of view, and otherwise I have no comment,” he said.

Still pending are other FCC fines stemming from the Stern show. Late last year, KLSX was fined $105,000 for airing allegedly indecent material on 12 separate occasions in late 1991 during hours when children might be listening. That penalty was immediately followed by record fines of $600,000 against Infinity stations in New York, Philadelphia and Washington for broadcasting the same material. The same three outlets were fined $6,000 in 1988, and the Philadelphia station was given a non-monetary censure in 1987.

Despite the latest fines, the FCC offered some ameliorating language about Stern’s owners, saying that “Infinity had made substantial and largely effective efforts to avoid further infractions in this area and that no actionable indecency complaints have been received by the commission against Infinity or Howard Stern show material in the more than six months since the last broadcast cited” in January.

Asked what would happen if complaints and evidential tapes taken from other Stern stations arrived at the FCC, Ratcliffe said: “That’s a whole different matter. I’m not soliciting complaints. (The commission) does not monitor and does not solicit information independently.”

There was no on-air comment from Stern Friday because the shock jock was in Los Angeles taping an episode of HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” Excerpts from old shows were rebroadcast in his absence.

The FCC defines indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive, as measured by contemporary community standards . . . sexual or excretory activities or organs.”

In the case of the latest complaint, Ratcliffe said that “there were a lot of days of material. . . . Then we also believe some of the material was quite egregious, highly offensive.”