Hot-Button Issue

The button is square and yellow and illuminated. It shines there on the left side of the console, and the console is crammed into a small booth outside the broadcast studio of WEEI, Boston's sports-talk radio juggernaut, on the third floor of the New Balance building, which looms above the Massachusetts Turnpike in Brighton. The "dump" button is mostly like all the other shining buttons, unless you know why it's there.

A casual visitor might not notice the button at all, but the people working in the control booth know always where it is. The button controls the 10-second delay that keeps the people in the booth that far ahead of the people on the telephones. The people in the booth sense the button's presence, you suspect, the way that other people are always aware of other buttons -- people in missile silos, say, deep beneath North Dakota.

The button began to shine a little brighter in February, when one pop star got up onstage at the Super Bowl, and he removed the business end of another pop star's bodice. There were children who saw most of the latter's right breast, that part at least that wasn't being covered by something that looked like an Aztec hubcap. That was just enough to awaken a somnolent beast known as the Federal Communications Commission, which seems always to sleep more lightly during election years.

After the Super Bowl, Bono of U2 dropped an F-bomb on live television, and National Public Radio dropped a commentator in California for unleashing similar ordnance. (Vice President Dick Cheney was fortunate that he used the same word only on the floor of the US Senate, instead of on the radio, where he could have found big-time trouble.) Singer Mary J. Blige whispered a sibilant S-word on 60 Minutes, and a complaint to the FCC flew shortly thereafter. Congress was talking about $500,000 fines, and a broadcaster's license seemed to hang less securely on the wall, and they came for Bubba the Love Sponge, and then they came for Howard Stern, and, suddenly, it became important that the host have a button, too. And what the government doesn't police, a public empowered and encouraged by the FCC's new vigor will. There's another button inside the WEEI studio now, so the hosts can use it. Everyone needs a button these days.

"Look," says one WEEI producer, "suppose I drop a cassette, or I'm getting something off the Internet, and I miss something and it gets out on the air. Now, not only can they fine the station, they can fine me and fine the host. It's a different time."

This isn't the first time that the government has taken an interest in what is now called "indecency" on the part of the people to whom it sublets the public airwaves. And it can be argued that the country has been stumbling since its founding through those massive gray areas between free speech and good taste, between the public's rights and the public's appetites.

However, over the past six months, there has been a fervor in the air that even people who have lived through similar moments find unprecedented. According to an analysis released in April by The Center for Public Integrity, in the days since Janet Jackson's outfit came apart at the Super Bowl, the FCC has levied six fines against broadcast outlets totalling in excess of $1.5 million, an amount greater than the total fines the FCC had handed down over the previous 10 years.

Michael C. Keith, a professor of communication at Boston College and a radio historian, attended this year's National Association of Broadcasters convention, and he says he saw how the redoubled efforts of the FCC to delineate the line between decency and indecency had created instead a fog of high-stakes ambiguity. "They were running workshops on how to avoid getting fined, and on what constituted indecency, which nobody still knows," Keith says. "There are tremendous land mines, and they were there three months ago, too, but nobody cared. Now they're paying attention to them.

There is hope among the radio people that the FCC's renewed vigor is simply a matter of election-year politicking. If President George W. Bush is reelected, they say, the crackdown will have demonstrated its political utility and will subsequently wither away. If John Kerry is elected, these same people argue, his FCC will probably be driven by different political constituencies with different political priorities -- a less laissez-faire approach to media consolidation, for example.

However, the current controversy has unleashed some forces that may not be so easily contained. On June 22, by a vote of 99 to 1 and as an amendment to the Defense Department authorization bill, the US Senate approved raising the fines for broadcast indecency from $27,500 per incident to $275,000. That bill is now in conference, where it will be reconciled with a House measure that is even tougher. It also has become the public vehicle for a roiling stew of other issues: How do we communicate with one another, and what is the kind of media culture we wish to create within which that communication can take place? After 15 years of praise for the unbridled, uncensored democracy of the Internet, more than a few people see the crackdown on "radio indecency" as the thin edge of a wedge that could carve pieces out of every medium, including the very newest ones.

"It's a grand hypocrisy," Keith says. "I mean, a few months ago, the FCC was out there campaigning for greater media conglomeration, to give more power to the conglomerates. Well, the first thing that means is that localism is gone, so local standards are gone. The atmosphere for this [crackdown] is more conducive because you've got these big corporations rolling this off. They're going to protect their shareholders."

Consider, as we must, the case of Bubba the Love Sponge -- nee Todd Clem -- a randy Florida-based bag of sins whose popular radio program was unceremoniously dumped by broadcasting behemoth Clear Channel Communications in February after the FCC fined Clear Channel a staggering $755,000 for sexual content that Bubba had unleashed.

What is important to remember is that the ambiguity created by the FCC's renewed efforts makes it very likely that not only would Bubba's broadcast draw a fine, but so, conceivably, could reading the FCC's own explanation of it. Even synonyms and euphemisms are now perilous.

It can be argued -- and has been -- that this is merely the FCC responding to public outrage; according to the commission itself, there were 530,885 complaints filed with the FCC between January and the end of February of this year. However, radio executives argue that their medium has been singled out to the exclusion of, say, television. In fact, of those 530,885 complaints filed with the FCC this year, all but 57 of them concerned the notorious Super Bowl halftime show, which was purely a televised phenomenon. In addition, the Center for Public Integrity analysis says that, since 1990, only 4 percent of the FCC's fines have been levied against television broadcasters. In addition, say some broadcasters, the FCC has taken a pass on the constitutionally thorny issue of intemperate political or "issue-oriented" talk radio. The FCC declined to comment specifically for this article, citing the volume of complaints that the commission is currently handling, and also citing the commission's reluctance to say anything that might be seen as even obliquely referring to any of them.

For the moment, at least, the FCC clearly means business. On June 9, Clear Channel, which owns 1,200 stations around the country, agreed to the largest settlement of its kind with the FCC, $1.75 million. This deal covered not only existing fines, many of them having to do with Howard Stern, who no longer is carried on any Clear Channel station. It also covered dozens of indecency complaints on which the FCC had yet to act. The huge media conglomerate essentially had cut a plea-bargain deal with the government.

The button keeps you ahead of it all. Someone uses a word that, in the argot of the new era, has something to do with "sexual or excretory functions," and you are 10 seconds ahead, so you can hit the button, and the offending words and phrases disappear into the ether, so that one is treated to a sentence like, "So me and her, right, we're out there --ing, and she starts ---- and ---- and, I'm ---- ," until you're unsure whether it's your radio or your ears that are in need of immediate maintenance, and meanwhile, people in their cars pound their dashboards and fill in the blanks on their own.

Nevertheless, the button keeps them ahead of the words, the memos and the regulations, the lawyers and the bosses, and the fines and the suspensions. And, because of that, the button can keep them ahead of the end of their careers. Only 10 seconds ahead of it, maybe. But that's just about enough these days.

ey," says Julie Kahn. "I'm OK with nipples." Well, we could describe her the way, say, Bubba would have, because we're part of a newspaper, and the FCC has no power over us. Nonetheless, that would be ungallant in the extreme, even though she says she wouldn't mind it, not even on the radio stations she manages. "They could say, like, 'Julie Kahn is an idiot. She's a doofus-head,' " Kahn explains. "But 'All women GMs suck.' They can't do that anymore." So that means you can't say all women are fat b-- , but can you call Hillary Clinton a fat b-- ?

"It's in poor taste," says Kahn, "but, technically, it's inside the line. She is a public figure."

Kahn is tall and bright, and with her enthusiasm at high tide, she could pass for someone well inside her stations' target demographics. At 45, Kahn's a radio lifer. She began as an account executive at WGN-AM in Chicago in 1981. Now, Kahn is vice president and general manager of both WEEI and WAAF, stations owned by Entercom, a Philadelphia-based media conglomerate.

Kahn fell into radio and wound up selling airtime on the radio broadcasts of the Chicago Cubs "when it wasn't cool for a girl to do that," she says. "And then I sold play-by-play in San Francisco for 18 years. To me, there's poetry in baseball on the radio. It's magical. "Of course, there is an environment created because Major League Baseball sets such rigid standards [for its broadcasts]. They won't even take liquor ads."

The same does not hold true for the broadcast discussions of those games after the fact. The current controversy over indecency has its roots in what's become known as "guy radio," which is variously defined as either unfettered or crude, populist or vulgar, but which is aimed at the same audience that buys Maxim at the magazine stands and which made Arnold Schwarzenegger first a movie star, and then a governor. It is the prime radio demographic -- males, 18 to 34 -- which the marketing people treasure. Stern is guy radio. So was Bubba. So were Opie and Anthony, two morning jocks rendered temporarily unemployable because of a stunt they pulled at WNEW-FM in New York City in 2002 that resulted in two listeners having sexual congress in St. Patrick's Cathedral. O&A began their career -- and, in 1998, were subject to their first high-profile dismissal -- in the Boston market, at WAAF.

But the taproot of guy radio runs deeply through the 20-year rise of all-sports talk radio. Which doesn't necessarily mean a 24-hour discussion of Should They Trade Nomar? For example, in 2001, WEEI fell into turmoil by having a stripper visit its morning show for the purpose of lighting on fire that part of her anatomy that the FCC now would fine you heavily for talking about on the air. There were complaints, both internally and from the outside. But they were nothing compared to what would happen if the same thing occurred today.

"There are no strippers in the studio to tell you about their sex lives [anymore]," says Gerry Callahan, a Boston Herald sports columnist who co-hosts the top-rated Dennis and Callahan morning show at WEEI. It was this show that hosted the pyrotechnics in question. "Even though we rarely did that, and hadn't done it for a long time."

"In my two radio stations," explains Kahn, "we talk to men with what men want to talk about -- women, sports, sexual innuendo with women, and sports again. It's part of what we do."

(It should be noted that, largely because of the content of the shows, the Globe has forbidden its writers to appear on either Dennis and Callahan or The Big Show, WEEI's successful afternoon drive-time show hosted by Glenn Ordway. WEEI responded by banning Globe writers from all its other programming.)

"I love the fact that what we do can be instantaneously on the air," Kahn says. "We're out there trying to entertain four or five hours straight, and it's not scripted, and it's not rehearsed. That's what's magical to me." And it is what she sees as threatened by the current push against what the FCC terms indecent programming. "Now you hear the delay," she says, "and it's actually comical."

"We have trained ourselves in what community standards are," she adds. "I don't think they understand how much creative content we have to come up with all the time."

he fight over "indecency" in public expression predates even the United States, which nonetheless went out of its way at its birth to try to cope with the problem in writing. Historian Leonard W. Levy quotes an 1803 essay by George Hay, a Virginia legislator and the son-in-law of President James Monroe, which defended the promulgation of any viewpoints however "immoral in their tendency." It's one of the longest running arguments in all of American history, and the only thing that has changed about it over the last 200-odd years is the technology under discussion.

"There is nothing new here," says Michael Keith. "What's going on now is as old as the radio medium."

Keith points out that government first began regulating radio because of radio's immense reach. In 1927, Congress established what was then the Federal Radio Commission and formulated a rule that said that radio station operators had to function as public trustees. This was based on what is called the "scarcity concept," which held that there was a finite amount of public resources on the radio-wave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. "Broadcasters always have had to toe the mark of protecting us against ourselves," Keith explains.

Keith has traced this all the way from 1937, when actress Mae West essentially was blacklisted from American radio, through 1958, when a Denver DJ got fired because the FCC threatened to revoke his station's license over the sound effect of a toilet flushing, through the 1960s and rabid talk-show pioneer Joe Pyne, and even through the 1970s, when there was a movement against a rudimentary sex-advice chat format that became known as "topless" radio. Topless radio drew the attention of Congress, and specifically of US Representative Torbert H. Macdonald of Massachusetts. In Dirty Discourse, a history of the subject that he coauthored with Robert L. Hilliard, Keith gives an account of how Macdonald threatened at a hearing in 1973 that, if the FCC didn't move against topless radio, Congress might have to do so, which Keith sees as a parallel situation to the one in which radio finds itself today.

"The climate was ripe for a more dramatic reaction," Keith explains. "First of all, the Republicans are running things, and they've had it in for Howard Stern and his millions of clones. [The Janet Jackson incident] was an opportunity. The ambush already was in place."

The terrain for it was first prepared by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s, a political sea change driven by the Christian right, a vital GOP constituency that had been crusading against broadcast indecency for decades. While serving as a Republican congressman representing central Massachusetts, Peter Blute sensed a more censorious tone rising even among his putative congressional allies. Blute was young and conservative, yet he saw a profound difference between himself and the other elements of the new Republican majority. For one thing, he couldn't tell them a joke.

"I remember starting to tell a joke in the cloakroom that was mildly off-color," says Blute. "And some of those guys actually moved away across the room so they wouldn't hear it. I thought, wow, don't light a match around these guys.

"What you're seeing now with the FCC is the same thing -- good red-state politics, because some people really are outraged about this stuff. But I think there's a danger of this all going too far."

What the FCC is doing now is closing the easily exploited loopholes opened in the regulations by the various modifiers: "patently" offensive, for example, or "contemporary" community standards. In 1998, Bubba the Love Sponge's Florida station got fined $23,000 for airing material that the FCC deemed indecent. Six years later, his proposed fine was nearly 35 times that, and his career had crashed.

The FCC's action has caused ripple effects throughout the medium. Corporate lawyers counsel their radio clients not even to approach what they perceive to be the new lines that the FCC has drawn. "The FCC sets some line," says Blute, who now co-hosts a morning talk show on WRKO. "Your lawyers, though, they say, why don't you stop here, short of where the FCC might go."

In addition, with an eye on the price of their stock, large broadcast conglomerates have shown themselves more than willing to cut their stars loose. On April 8, the FCC threatened Clear Channel with a half-million-dollar fine for allegedly indecent material that was broadcast on the Howard Stern show, one of the most successful radio programs in the history of the medium. Clear Channel responded by kicking Stern off the six Clear Channel stations that carried his program. While it did little to dent Stern's popularity, it was a signifying event nonetheless.

The FCC has conducted its latest crackdown largely by loosening its complaint procedures. Previously, it was critical that the complainant provide a tape or transcript of the offending material. Now, however, according to the FCC's procedures as outlined on the commission's website, all that is required is a description of the offending material, including what was said and when it was said, and the call sign of the station involved. If the FCC decides to act on a complaint, it's up to the broadcaster to provide the evidence. Because the crackdown itself does not involve new regulations but, rather, radical interpretations of the old ones, what once was permissible may now be cause for a complaint and a fine. And because the FCC has told stations that they will be informed only when a complaint actually has been filed, Julie Kahn and hundreds of other radio executives are walking through the new landscape largely blind.

"I'm shocked at how radio is being held to a higher standard than either print or television," she says. "Opie and Anthony probably started the radio focus. . . . FCC rules have not changed. They are now being interpreted in an entirely different way. They're reinterpreting them without having rewritten the law."

IT'S MAY 14, AND JAY SEVERIN is having a wonderful afternoon. Addressing an audience that he repeatedly refers to as "the best and the brightest," the evening drive-time host at Boston's WTKK is talking about the flap over the Globe publishing a photo that included overly graphic images. He is very happy about this. He informs his listeners that he has "one of those four-hour erections" you hear about. Along the way, he refers to the Globe's ombudsman -- a woman, as it happens -- as "the ombudwhore" and the "ombud-masturbator."

"I would call that close," says Matt Mills, the station's vice president and general manager. "But 'masturbation' you can say. It's not one of the seven dirty words. But I would call that close to the line."

There is in the current climate a tendency to conflate indecency with incivility, an even less easily defined concept, and nowhere is this conflation as problematic as it is in the realm of political talk radio. For the moment, the FCC's crackdown has concentrated mainly on entertainment programming -- specifically the "shock jocks" who came out of the mold of Howard Stern. But more than a few people have wondered -- and Severin has speculated on the air -- whether or not political talk might be next.

"I hope the Republicans are happy playing Elmer Gantry," says Severin, who has also worked as a GOP political consultant. "It is the Republicans who are letting the camel's nose under the tent."

Just as Stern pushed the envelope for smirking sexuality, Rush Limbaugh's success opened the door for increasing incivility among the political talkers. For example, without the wild success of Limbaugh, it seems unlikely that WRKO in Boston would have visited upon its listeners the likes of Michael Savage, a syndicated host whose show reaches an estimated 6 million listeners nationally. In May, Savage suggested that he would have liked to have seen the light sticks with which American prison guards allegedly sodomized Iraqi prisoners replaced with sticks of dynamite. Even Limbaugh, who dismissed the prison abuse by comparing it to fraternity hazing, has never gone that far.

It is not likely that the FCC in a Republican administration, and led by Michael K. Powell, the son of the secretary of state, will make any attempt to rein in the excesses of political talk radio, which is by and large a conservative medium, and which in any case would be a legal and constitutional tangle from which the FCC might never emerge. Which might seem to leave a huge loophole in the current crackdown -- namely, that rules that suddenly have been enforced against entertainment programming do not apply so long as the words and concepts in question are being applied to politicians and political issues. "We are interpreting the borders of risk," says Julie Kahn. And she's getting some help.

The FCC crackdown also has emboldened community groups to take action on their own against what they perceive to be "offensive programming," taking advantage of the loosened requirements for filing a formal complaint with the FCC. These groups span the ideological divide. The conservative Parents Television Council boasts a full-time staff of six whose only job is to monitor the content of the various media. And conservative muckraker-turned-whistle-blowing-liberal David Brock this spring launched www.mediamatters.org, a website that almost immediately began bedeviling such staples of rightist radio as Limbaugh, Savage, and Sean Hannity.

There are also ad hoc campaigns. On May 13, for example, in response to a firestorm of public outrage, KNRK radio in Portland, Oregon, another Entercom station, fired its entire morning team after they made sport of the beheading in Iraq of Nicholas Berg.

"This all really has to do with what people's sensibilities are, and with what really hits a nerve," says Ralph C. Martin II, a Boston attorney and former Suffolk County district attorney. "I can't categorically say that it's better to have a community response than it is an FCC response. On the other hand, there are always going to be areas where the definition of free speech in contemporary society is going to be the most difficult."

Last October, Martin's path crossed Julie Kahn's in the vague netherworld between indecency and incivility. On September 29, on the Dennis and Callahan morning show, the two hosts were discussing the escape of Little Joe, a gorilla, from the Franklin Park Zoo. The ape was photographed standing absurdly at an MBTA bus stop. John Dennis referred to the animal as a "Metco gorilla," to which Callahan added, "heading out to Lexington." The storm broke swiftly. The two were suspended for two weeks -- but only after Dennis alone had been suspended for two days. Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly demanded a meeting with Entercom and WEEI executives, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts pulled $27,000 worth of advertising from the station.

As it happens, Martin is a member of the board at Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and he learned about the controversy at a company retreat. "At first I thought, this has to be wrong," he says. "I thought, well, they couldn't have said that."

Shortly thereafter, Entercom engaged Martin to negotiate with Metco and with the community groups supporting its demands against WEEI. Martin helped negotiate an agreement in February that allowed the two hosts to keep their jobs but that obligated Entercom to contribute to Metco's scholarship program, to air public service announcements for Metco, and to add two college internships, earmarked for students of color.

Metco "wanted something constructive to come out of this, which to me is a much more enlightened approach," recalls Martin, who is black. "They wanted it to be a learning experience for the kids, and they wanted it to be a learning experience for the anchors, too."

Just as the agreement was being negotiated, and in a move that Entercom insisted was coincidental, Kahn was picked to replace WEEI general manager Tom Baker. She took the station through the ensuing fallout, including sending the hosts in question to sensitivity seminars -- twice. "Three times if they have to," Kahn says. "It gave us some guidelines, and it scared the bejesus out of the offenders, and it should have, and I don't have a problem with that at all."

BRETT ERICKSON KNOWS WHERE THE BUTTON IS. He is one of two producers of WEEI's The Big Show, and there are a few more tiny spots of dead air on The Big Show than there used to be before Janet Jackson's unfortunate wardrobe malfunction. "You try not to let it affect you," Erickson says. "Before, we didn't hear much from the management, and part of that was the ratings and stuff. Now, they come down, and you have to be a little bit careful. If something happens, I'm the one that's going to pay, but if we do a completely sanitized show, and the ratings go down, I'm going to be the first one fired, too."

Erickson is not entirely wrong. When Clear Channel removed Howard Stern from the six Clear Channel stations that carried his program, the ratings for those stations went through the floor.

It is a different time, and the optimists among them hope that it will pass with the election this fall. The question is where the line will have moved when the dust settles. "My sense is that both Bush and Kerry support this," says Julie Kahn. "I don't know much about [Michael] Powell. Maybe he's a dogcatcher after a couple of big dogs, and if he gets them, he'll just go away."

"It's definitely going to blow away," agrees Michael Keith. "This is a strange country, but this is nothing new. There's just more media in which to talk about the media these days."

So the button shines a little more brightly, there in the corner of everyone's eye, but there's also that afternoon when you're driving home, and WEEI's The Big Show somehow gets around to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Fred Smerlas, a former NFL lineman and regular guest, has an opinion on the junior senator from New York that he'd like to share.

"That fat b-- ," he explains, and everybody laughs. The button gleams. The show goes on.

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff.