A military town joins the Dixie Chicks flap

In San Diego, where one in four people is associated with the military, a pair of competing country-music stations are getting an earful in the Dixie Chicks controversy. But they have reacted in different ways. While one waits for the controversy to cool, it’s accusing the other of fanning the flames.

When Natalie Maines, the top-selling group’s lead singer, declared during a London concert March 10 that she was ashamed of President Bush being a fellow Texan, many country radio stations across the nation stopped playing the trio that before then was a staple on their airwaves.

After plenty of outraged callers said, “If you play them, I’m never listening to you again,” San Diego’s KSON-FM (97.3) and XHCR-FM (99.3) both pulled the Chicks from their playlists.

“For us, it’s a numbers game,” said Mike O’Brian, program director at XHCR, known as “Bob 99.3.” “Every station I’m aware of is charged with getting ratings. Our audience has clearly spoken: ‘We don’t want to hear their music.’ And we’re honoring that.”

But while KSON also dropped the Dixie Chicks for a few days, management decided to start easing their songs back into the rotation on Monday.

“We feel very, very deeply in her right as an American to say what she feels,” said Darrel Goodin, vice president and San Diego market manager for Jefferson-Pilot Communications, which owns KSON. “For that reason, we’re not going to get into McCarthyism, or blacklisting, or anything like that.”

But KSON quickly backed off. Every time the station tried to play a Chicks song, furious listeners burned up the phone lines.

“For the next couple of days, we’re probably going to be off their product. We have every intention of returning their product to the air once emotions cool down,” Goodin said. “At this moment in our city, it’s such a hot topic and people are so emotional.”

Government figures show that San Diego is home to 129,000 sailors and Marines, 120,000 military dependents, 59,297 retirees and surviving dependents, and 23,000 civilian Defense Department employees. According to some measures, one of every four adults in the county is either in the service or a job related to the military. The city is home base to the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, whose Bunker Hill launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq Thursday morning. So, especially coming in the final week of a push toward war, Maines’ offhand remark felt like a slap to many in that community. “Any comments they perceive as derogatory to their commander in chief they see as an attack on them,” O’Brian said.

But Goodin criticized the way his rival is handling the situation, saying the outright boycott by XHCR, which trails KSON in the ratings, is merely a bid for attention. He also questioned the patriotic sincerity of the station, which he notes broadcasts from Tijuana and is owned by a Mexican company, XETRA Communicaciones.

O’Brian denied the prohibition was merely a stunt and was matter-of-fact about his motives. “We’re not trying to play any card, patriotic or otherwise,” he said. “It’s not about some marketing ploy. It’s clearly a numbers game.

“As our research has shown, 85% to 90% of our audience does not want to hear their music today,” O’Brian said. “If 85% to 90% of our audience wanted to hear polka today, that’s what I’d do.”

After the initial outrage at her comments, Maines released a statement on March 12 saying she spoke out of frustration that “the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.” The band members also said that, while they support the troops, they fear “the prospect of all the innocent lives that will be lost.”

That wasn’t enough for some, and two days later Maines apologized, acknowledging that her remark was disrespectful to Bush and his office.

It’s not the first time Maines and the military have been at opposite sides of an issue. She criticized the Toby Keith song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” with lyrics saying that anyone messing with the U.S. will get a boot in the behind. Maines called the song -- a country hit especially popular in the armed forces -- “ignorant.”

O’Brian called Maines’ apology to Bush “a first step in the right direction.”

And Goodin said the angry phone calls the station got anytime they played the group are already starting to give ground to those saying, “If you don’t play the Dixie Chicks, I’ll never listen to you again.” But the band remains off their air for now.

“We are not attempting to punish them,” he said. “We just don’t think it’s in their best interest or our best interest, because emotions are running too high.”

L.A.’s country station, KZLA-FM (93.9), continues to play the Dixie Chicks. And Goodin doubts the boycott at other outlets will stick.

“They’re one of the backbones of the format,” he said. “It’s really impossible to do country without them.”

L.A. stations join war coverage

Shortly after cruise missiles began falling on Baghdad, many L.A.-area stations began saturating the air themselves, before easing back on news coverage once they discovered the all-out war had not yet begun.

Wednesday night, in addition to expected news outlets such as National Public Radio affiliates KPCC-FM (89.3) and KCRW-FM (89.9), all-news stations KFWB-AM (980) and KNX-AM (1070), and talk stations KFI-AM (640) and KABC-AM (790), several FM music stations also broke programming to air at least President Bush’s speech announcing the attack. KKJZ (88.1), KZLA, KYSR (98.7), KIIS (102.7), KOST (103.5) and KBIG (104.3), among others, carried the president’s message.

On KFI, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou followed by speaking to an Iraqi expatriate leader, and Chiampou noted that that night, Iraqi television was airing a Bill Pullman movie in which he plots to kill a secretary with whom he had an affair. “A little anti-American propaganda, there,” he said.

KFWB aired an interview with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), in which he said that although he plans to seek his party’s nomination to run against Bush in 2004, “tonight there’s not an inch of distance between us.”

Far from that camp, though, was KPFK-FM (90.7), the local affiliate of the left-wing Pacifica network, which aired John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Network personality Amy Goodman followed with an anecdote about being denied permission to distribute peace literature at an Ani DiFranco concert in New Jersey. “It appears this war is going to be fought on two fronts,” she said -- in Iraq and at home.

Some stations carried on as normal, though, and left the war news and comment to others. So alternative rocker KROQ-FM (106.7) was playing Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” with singer Kurt Cobain repeating the line, “No, I don’t have a gun.”