A strange new sound has been crackling over the nation's radio airwaves, the same airwaves that have been dominated by Rush Limbaugh and other specialists in right-wing Sturm und Drang. Suddenly, in the thick of an election year, a left-leaning equivalent has emerged, riling a mass audience with scathing, eloquent attacks on the Bush administration.
The biggest surprise of all? The long-sought liberal talk radio hero isn't Air America's Al Franken, but that walking, talking wedge issue, Howard Stern.
Fittingly, the politicization of Stern began with a woman's bared breast. The Federal Communications Commission crackdown on broadcast indecency that followed Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" hit Stern hard. The FCC proposed fining broadcast giant Clear Channel Communications $495,000 for several of Stern's raunchy utterances; Clear Channel promptly dropped Stern from its six stations that had carried him.
Stern has been at odds with the FCC for years, but these latest proposed fines, and the looming threat of more, have driven Stern to a new level of apoplexy -- and to broadcasting the most pugnacious anti-Bush vitriol anywhere in the mainstream media. In Stern's view, he is the victim of a witch hunt, singled out by an administration in the grip of fundamentalist Christian ideologues bent on morality regulation.
These days, Stern's broadcasts are divided between his usual schtick -- interviews with strippers, off-color song parodies, jokes about celebrities -- and rants against the president. Stern will never be mistaken for a policy wonk, but tune in to his show and you'll hear him cogently attacking administration positions on an impressive range of issues: stem-cell research, abortion rights, gay marriage, media consolidation, the handling of Iraq.
Meanwhile, Stern's revamped website looks more like Mother Jones magazine than Maxim: It features articles about the administration's trade violations in Myanmar and includes a link to the contributions page of the John Kerry for President site. Indeed, Stern has become an ardent Kerry advocate. "I call on all fans of the show to vote against Bush," he said on a recent broadcast. "We're going to deliver the White House to John Kerry."
Some might dismiss this as bluster, but Stern's words should send a shiver up Karl Rove's spine. Stern has a record of successful election-year activism; political observers in New York and New Jersey remember how his on-air endorsements delivered key votes to George Pataki and Christine Todd Whitman in past gubernatorial races.
