About 10 years ago my brother-in-law was giving me a lift through the early morning Washington traffic when he suddenly gave a whoop of joy. "It’s Howie!" yelled Ivo, turning up the radio. "We gotta listen to Howie!" And it was with mounting disbelief that I listened to the next 20 minutes of the Howard Stern show, a shameless and cynical attempt to scandalise the ear.
That morning Howard was appealing to his listeners to ring in with the most tear-jerking hard-luck story. In return he was offering a nude massage at the hands of an attractive nude masseuse. In a display of Oprah Winfreyesque exhibitionism, the audience was competing for that massage. We heard of divorces, and bereavements, and embarrassing disfigurements. But the winner (I advise sensitive readers to faint now) was a man who rang in to say that he had just been diagnosed with cancer, and might lose his gonads, but had not yet had the courage to tell his girlfriend.
Howard Stern pounced. "What’s her number?" he said. With lightning efficiency his producers patched the caller through to his girlfriend, and soon she was being told – live on air – that there was good news and bad news.
The bad news was that her boyfriend had cancer, and the good news was that he was the winner of a nude massage. The poor woman gasped and sobbed. I sat there in exactly the state desired by the producers of the Howard Stern show – appalled, disgusted, but also thrilled by the horror of what was apparently (and I stress apparently) taking place on the radio.
We just don’t have shows like this in Britain, I said to Ivo. That’s right, he said, and he told me about the shock jocks. He explained the tactics of men such as Stern and Rush Limbaugh, how they shamelessly chased after ratings by causing outrage, how they goosed the secret prejudices of their listeners. Some people tuned in because they actually agreed with what was being said. Most people just enjoyed the theatre, the vehemence, the provocation.
These shock jocks were national institutions, with millions of weekly listeners. They were a new and important part of the American constitution, and that is my first objection to the utterly demented decision by Jacqui Smith’s Home Office to announce that Michael Savage, America’s third most popular radio show host, is banned from entering this country. It just makes us look so infantile, so pathetic.
Every day the American airwaves are churned by the paranoid rantings of Michael Savage and his kind. Has this stuff warped America, or deformed its political psyche? On the contrary, the Americans have just had the good sense to elect a supremely gifted and eloquent black man – when the prospect of a black British prime minister still seems some way off. What are we, some sort of kindergarten that needs to be protected against these dangerous American radio shows? Does Jacqui Smith think we are all dimwits, who can’t tell when a man like Savage is talking rubbish? Why can America take it, and we can’t?
May 13, 2009
