Letters to the Editor
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Don't get it
Many times as I am scannning through the tv stations I will come across Howard Stern's show and pause for a little while, hoping that maybe I'll catch a glimpse of whatever it is that makes him so appealing to so many people. No luck so far. The very rare nugget of insight or wit or originality is buried in so much juvenile and predictable garbage that to me its not worth the time to wade through, let alone $13 per month.
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Do your button shoes feel a little tight this morning..?
Of COURSE people of a good stripe don't listen to Howard Stern, everyone KNOWS that.
ALL he has to offer is filth! It's just filth!!
Until you listen. And you hear a modern-day incarnation of Groucho Marx. And you realize that you quite thoroughly enjoy four hours a day of entertainment, news and bullshit. Without the endless shit-fake-bastard patina that covers everyone and everything else in the entertainment world.
$12 a month? A non-issue.
Actually that much money is more than worth it to see lobbyists pull the strings of Congress to try and get them to allow the FCC to regulate satellite radio, Constitution and Bill of Rights be damned.
Where else but the Howard Stern show could you ever hear the simple truth that the religious right is full of shit? Expressed just that way?
It says something that millions of listeners have sought the refuge of satellite radio to keep the government out of their choice of entertainment. Fuck the FCC. Hard. With a diseased penis.
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missed the point
The author of this article missed a critical point. While Stern is a star on Satellite Radio, he is not the ONLY THING on satellite radio. I wouldn't pay $12 a month to listen to Stern, but I would gladly pay $12 a month for the whole package that Sirius provides. For me it is very much worth it to get to listen to what I want when i want. I get to listen to broadway hits while driving through rural montana, love songs with my special someone, 80's hits while I am highway driving... the list goes on.
Viva la satellite!
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SIRIUS is certainly worth it to me!
In my northwestern corner of Louisiana, prior to the advent of SIRIUS and XM, talk radio options were exclusively hard (harsh?)right - a conservative Louisiana-themed show, followed by Rush, followed by Sean. The only broadcast venue even remotely close to the center -let alone (gasp!) left of center - was FM PBS. AM radio in this area was and is one uninterrupted spew of right wing diatribes with absolutely no dissenting opinion. Because I spend substantial time in my vehicle I'd listen to these shows for lack of anything better. Anyone who listens exclusively to Rush and Sean day after day, week after week, becomes either a nonthinking dittohead or a reactionary offended by the propagandistic bias of these shows. There can be no middle position. With my subscription to SIRIUS I'm now able to sample diverse opinion. I'm occasionally as offended by left-wing bias as right-wing, but with satellite radio I have options - CSPAN, CNN, BBC, PBS, ABC, FOX, Left and Right Talk, etc. And should these pall, there is copious music and now even. . .Howard. . .should worse come to worst.
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Stern's rants
I strongly disagree that Stern is "best when he's fighting against the many forces -- the government, conservatives, Don Imus -- he claims are arrayed against him." Stern's rants against those forces or individuals often take up inordinate amounts of air time, and they are much more frequently tiresome than funny, especially for regular listeners (of any political persuasion). Recall that prior to the election of 2004, Stern received almost daily phone calls asking him to stop the anti-Bush harangues simply because they weren't funny. He himself admitted that he received plenty of listener emails saying the same thing, but this is obviously a person who cannot let go of his persecution complex. (He was hoping that under a Democratic White House the FCC would lose some of its support.) Near the end of his run on terrestrial radio, he tried to cut down on the rants against his radio station censors and against the FCC, acknowledging again that he was testing his listeners' patience.
Stern is funny and/or interesting when he's talking to the freaks who populate his radio world, when he's talking about his personal life, when he's talking about what goes on behind the scenes in show business, and when he's conducting his unique brand of celebrity interview. He's also funny when he gets mad at someone he works with - but because those are ongoing, direct relationships, those particular rants change, or are complicated by real-life developments. Fortunately, that tension - between Stern and the people around him - will never go away, thanks to his willingness to complain about and pick apart just about anyone in his immediate vicinity.
The prospect of never again hearing him complain for an hour about Bush or the FCC is a happy one for this listener. I do not think that the author's stated worries are shared by Stern's audience in general.
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Worth the money?
Personally I can't stand Howard Stern and his show, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't worth $13 per month for those who like this stuff.
I just spent $40 for a program that automates the recording to CD of streaming BBC radio, which I play in my car and at work. I also have to spend some money on the recordable CDs. However this beats the hell out of life a few years ago when I was dealing with short wave radios, rooftop antennae and generally unreliable signals.
The fact is that these things give us immeasurable pleasure, regardless of our particular tastes, and if we didn't spend the money on this, we would probably just spend it on something worse.
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Howard's World
Howard Stern is worth little of my time, and certainly none of my money (not that $13 a month is very much - most people throw that much away almost daily for stuff they can't even remenber spending it on). So I'll keep it short, and not even strain my brain to come up with a few comments, but simply repeat a few words from the article. Stern is "self-aggrandizing, sexually obsessed, misogynistic, racially insensitive, homophobic, insecure and (a) very stupid man." Oh yeah, and monumentally sophomoric. To answer the question posed at the end of the piece, "will the world beyond his superfans continue to care about what he does?" God, I hope not.