Stern Warning

On the cusp of its 75th anniversary, morning radio faces some of its toughest challenges yet. What started out as an experiment with light-hearted goofiness has devolved into a world of powerful "shock jocks" and right wing demagogues.

In a move aimed at showing it's serious about its "zero tolerance" policy, Clear Channel Communications, whose president and CEO John Hogan is a strong Bush supporter, recently dumped Howard Stern, radio's #1 shock jock, from six of its radio stations. Stern, whose New York-based show is syndicated through Viacom subsidiary Infinity Broadcasting, claims his dismissal has less to do with indecency and more to do with politics, having recently flipped from pro-to-anti-Dubya.

In mid-March, fueled by the controversy over the baring of Janet Jackson's right breast during the Super Bowl half-time show, the House passed a tough broadcast-indecency bill that will radically jack up the maximum fines for broadcasting "indecent" material. Around the same time, the Federal Communications Commission voted 4-1 to add another quarter-million dollar fine to the bill of Clear Channel Communications. The fine was leveled because of nine alleged violations on a March 13, 2003 broadcast of the network's "Elliot in the Morning" show involving "graphic and explicit sexual material ... designed to pander to, titillate and shock listeners," the Associated Press reported. The only dissenting commissioner complained that the fine wasn't high enough.

Clear Channel, which owns 1,200 stations nationwide, continues to chew its nails over increased Congressional scrutiny and promises to clean up its act. Stern believes his days are numbered and he is fighting back, calling for support from his audience and turning to friendly D.C. legislators. (Stern recently asked frequent guest Rep. Jose Serrano (D-New York), to put him on his staff so he could appear at hearings, passing notes and whispering in the Congressman's ear, like in the old crime movies.)

Howard Stern didn't spring full blown from the head of Zeus; there is a lineage in the freaky world of wakeup radio. What started out more than seventy years ago as an experiment merging audience building and uncommon salesmanship with light-hearted goofiness, has devolved into a world of powerful "shock jocks" and right wing demagogues.

In the early 1930s Frank Cope initiated the Alarm Klok Klub on KJBS in San Francisco, California, broadcasting from 5 to 8 A.M. every morning, except Sunday. Cope was a master of studied casualness; spinning records and the first to spoof the advertiser's copy. "Cope was probably the world's first bona fide disk jockey, and his daily...[program] was San Francisco's most popular radio program for nearly twenty-five years," John F. Schneider wrote in his 1997 book The History of KJBS, San Francisco.

While Cope became a regional phenomenon, Arthur Godfrey took this new folksy laid-back morning radio format to the nation. "Although Arthur Godfrey is often given credit for being the first radio personality to ad lib commercials and kid his sponsors," Schneider wrote, "Cope was doing all this on KJBS in the 1930's." But Godfrey, who was later to become a television icon, perfected the one-on-one style of morning talk; a friendly voice that seemed to be talking to each member of the listening audience.

Soon, across the continental 48, wakeup shows began cropping up on powerful outlets, but local, spontaneous independents -- with their own newsmen, local advertising base, and community feel -- came to rule the roost by 1950.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, "personality" radio featured controversial local morning hosts who gave exposure to a group of heady iconoclasts (the so-called "sick comics") such as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Shelley Berman. This morning show access to comedy promotion is codified to this day.