Getting Sirius in his crusade

By Martin Miller

Dec. 16, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Proving conventional wisdom wrong time and again, Howard Stern built a wildly successful, nationally syndicated morning radio program around his male adolescence-gone-wild persona, strangely revealing celebrity interviews and a carnival-like cast of misfit characters that included the mentally impaired, raging alcoholics and exotic dancers who became affectionately known to the show’s millions of daily listeners as the “Wack Pack.”

Whether he was a force for further vulgarizing the culture or liberating it from its puritanical neuroses depends upon the ear of the listener. But whatever your viewpoint, one thing is clear: In addition to almost singlehandedly creating a new species of talk show hosts -- involving behavior that morning show newcomers now must either emulate or surpass -- Stern also pushed, stamped and shook pop culture.

“He’s a pioneer, though I hate to use that word because it sounds laudatory, but he forged a beachhead in his ability to shock an audience,” said Tim Winter, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Parents Television Council, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for stricter standards of decency in broadcast radio and television. “We’re very happy to see him leave the public airwaves.”

Today marks the last live broadcast of Stern’s drive-time show, heard locally on KLSX-FM (97.1), in what is being touted as a grand celebratory exclamation point to a trailblazing career in terrestrial radio. The farewell promises to deliver the same line-crossing raucousness that brought Stern enormous fame, wealth and an unprecedented number of fines for indecency, from the Federal Communications Commission.

While Stern’s sonorous voice takes off for satellite radio, his spirit will remain imprinted on the earthbound medium for years to come. One of his most obvious legacies is the way radio talks about sex -- less innuendo, more in-your-face. Stern benefited in this from the emerging technologies of home video and the Internet, which made pornography easily accessible to practically anyone.

He was rarely shy about sharing his unusual personal habits or even what were once considered private details about the anatomy. In one memorable moment, Stern revealed how he’d masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima -- a discussion that tagged his employer, Infinity Broadcasting, with a $600,000 fine in 1992.

“His show was one of the first places in the mainstream media where people could openly talk about porn,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communications at New York University. “He loved porn and was proud of it, and by being so, really helped reduce the shame attached to it.”

In fact, talking about porn became a regular feature of mainstream pop culture, regularly mentioned on sitcoms such as “Friends” and movies (and not just R-rated ones).

In other ways too, Stern altered radio by proving a talk format could succeed on FM, thereby paving the way for widely syndicated shock jocks of today such as Tom Leykis and the duo of Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold. But before Stern came around in the early 1980s, FM -- once prized for its superior signal and fewer commercial interruptions compared with AM -- was almost solely for music, while talk was merely background and incidental.

After Stern, that equation threatens to be reversed.

“He has to be considered one of the broadcasters of the 20th century,” said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of the talk radio magazine “Talker.” “Within a couple years, in large part due to Howard Stern, FM will be dominated by talk.”

There were other changes as well. Radio’s prevailing wisdom once held that morning drive-time shows -- traditionally big moneymakers -- had to be local for audiences to have a chance to connect with them. National syndication was simply out of the question. But beginning in 1988, when he debuted at WYSP-FM in Philadelphia, Stern showed it could be done. Today, Stern’s final show, broadcast from New York, will be heard on more than 45 affiliates around the country.

“Everyone said Philadelphia was too provincial and Stern’s show would never work there, but it did,” said Mark Ramsey, president of Mercury, a San Diego-based radio research and marketing company. “Finally he made it to L.A., and people said his show was an East Coast thing and it would never work, and of course it did. He kept proving people wrong in almost every market.”

As Stern put it in an interview earlier this month to promote his new show on Sirius Satellite Radio, which debuts Jan. 9: “My goal was to be a national morning show. I did that.... I was the guy who convinced the entire industry that morning radio could be syndicated.”

Easily lost in the haze of his bathroom humor and sexual banter is Stern’s exceptional skill as an interviewer, which almost always knocked celebrities off their prepared talking points and into a more authentic presentation. In that way, his sharp-tongued and relentless style of questioning served as a powerful cultural counterweight to the customary fawning Hollywood profile.

While he would conscientiously plug a guest’s pet projects, Stern would rarely spend much time talking about them. Instead, he often maneuvered studio visitors into revealing deeply intimate details about themselves -- first sexual encounter, favorite sexual position, a recent divorce, or recently, to the chagrin of Robert Downey Jr., specifics about their time in jail.

Champion or chicken?

Of course, Stern’s prurient interviews frequently landed him in trouble. An infamous example came in 2004 when he grilled Paris Hilton’s ex-boyfriend about anal sex, a tack that ultimately led Clear Channel Communications to pull Stern off the air on six of its stations.

To many, Stern’s nearly two-decade battle with the FCC transformed the shock jock into a champion for 1st Amendment rights. At issue, as Stern put it to former FCC Chairman Michael Powell (son of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell), was nothing less than censorship. As usual, Stern attacked in his take-no-prisoners style.

“You’re the judge, you’re the arbiter, you’re the one who tells us what we can say and can’t say on the air,” Stern said to Powell in a surprise confrontation last year on a San Francisco radio call-in show. “And yet I really don’t even think you’re qualified to be the head of the commission. Do you deny that your father got you this job?”

Said Tobe Berkowitz, a communications professor at Boston University: “If you like irony, you have to love that Howard became the poster boy for the 1st Amendment. He fought the good fight for freedom of speech.”

But others aren’t so sure Stern deserves lionization just yet.

“I don’t buy he’s a hero,” said Vaidhyanathan, who noted that Stern could have fought much harder in court against the fines and indecency charges before heading to satellite radio. “Clearly he chickened out.”

While Stern’s legacy in terrestrial radio seems clear, what it will be in satellite remains to be seen. Already, though, he is being lauded for putting satellite on the national radar screen and boosting audience for both Sirius and its main competitor, XM Satellite Radio, which together expect to exceed 8 million subscribers by year’s end.

Something the satellite radio companies will be watching in particular is how Stern’s new show fares with paid sponsorships -- a fact that would seem to undercut one of satellite’s main selling points, namely its supposedly commercial-free environment. If Stern’s show succeeds in spite of the advertisements, which he has promised will number far fewer than on his current show, radio observers warn satellite listeners to brace themselves for further commercialization of the new medium.

Just as he has always been known as an innovator in crossing mediums to make more money, Stern again is out to prove he can do it in satellite. Starting in the spring, his satellite show will be available through local cable companies, just as his terrestrial show was once broadcast on cable television. Fans will be able to watch his new radio show unfold -- completely uncensored -- for an extra fee.

“This has nothing to do with radio,” said Stern. “This has everything to do with show business. We’re content providers over a new platform.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Howard Stern on terrestrial radio

National audience

Daily listeners: approximately 12 million

Stations: 45 affiliates, mostly big-city markets, including

New York, Los Angeles,

San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Dallas.

Ratings: Consistently ranks in the top three, frequently first, especially in the major markets. In the last ratings period in Los Angeles (KSLX-FM 97.1), Stern placed No. 1 in English language morning drive-time shows in the 25-to-54 age category.

Los Angeles audience

83% are white

60% are between 25 and 54

52% are married

41% have white-collar jobs

35% have a household income above $75,000

22% have a college degree or higher

Alcohol consumption

58% do not buy wine

44% consumed a beer within the last 30 days

Political party

30% Democrat