Straits of the arts.

Occasionally, there occurs a seemingly random, serendipitous confluence of events, the meaning of each quite accidentally expanding on the other.

On June 9 it was reported that Clear Channel Communications, the nation's single largest radio station owner, with some 1,300 local stations under the corporate belt, had settled all of its outstanding "indecency" charges with the Federal Communications Commission to the tune of a $1.75 million fine. A horde of parenting and moral watchdog groups hailed the FCC's action against Clear Channel, whose offenses related mostly to potty and titty jokes on Howard Stern's hugely popular morning show, as well as other, smaller-time, offenders. There was no mention of this on Clear Channel's website except incidentally that it had dropped "The Howard Stern Show" from the rest of its stations.

I view the FCC's and Clear Channel's actions with not a small bit of trepidation. First, Clear Channel exists in its current incarnation largely because of industry deregulation and the relaxation of ownership rules in multiple markets. This has resulted in a boon of unimaginable proportions for the industry's giants: Infinity Broadcasting, Viacom, Clear Channel, and others. It has also unleashed a consequence which may or may not have been intended.

It's a well-established principal of warfare, marketing, and politics that the bigger a target, the easier it is to hit. This makes the corporate carriers of shock jocks dead meat for those segments of our society who feel it is their mission to protect us and our children from virtually anything, not least of which is the mere mention of sex, on the airwaves. Deregulation and industry consolidation has neatly made their job easier. It doesn't take much. A well orchestrated letter writing campaign--a few hundred will do--to Clear Channel's moral guardians at the FCC and the behemoth is on the block. Disregard the vagueness of the FCC's standards and what constitutes a finable offense. All you really need is a relative handful of outraged citizens, and the moral integrity of the airwaves is, at least for the nonce, restored. There's another word for this: censorship.

So, we have an FCC who shares in its Administration's belief that governance should serve as the moral gatekeeper of the governed, and whose swift and sure reaction to a small letter writing campaign successfully reined in a corporate giant's alleged civic irresponsibility. Certainly, the complainants had a much easier time censoring Stern and his ilk this time around. Before deregulation and consolidation, the outraged had to go after a particular station. The rules that then banned the kind of ownership that now typifies radio made it prohibitive if not impossible to go much beyond threatening a single station's license. Not so today. Hence, the perhaps--and perhaps not--unintended consequence: what's good for megabusiness has become a bounty for the self-anointed guardians of public morality.

The first irony is that Clear Channel, despite coughing up $1.75 million, last week's petty cash, still laughs all the way to the bank. They reap huge profits on Stern's and other shock jocks' popularity, pay a small fine when they cross whatever line is in vogue this week, and throw 'em off the air for a while. But the lure of profit is far greater than the fear of a handful of moral guardians. My guess is that after an appropriate cooling off period, when they think no one's looking, Stern and his ad revenues ...