Shock Jocks
Should racist and misogynistic speech be regulated?
By Marcia Clemmitt

When Don Imus labeled the Rutgers University women's basketball team “nappy-headed hos” in April, it first looked to be just one more insult hurled in his long career. Imus was penalized initially with a two-week suspension. But when the incident appeared on the Internet site youtube.com, organizations ranging from the National Association of Black Journalists to the liberal media watchdog. . . .

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Is ethnic and racial humor dangerous?

Arthur Asa Berger Professor of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts San Francisco State University. Written for CQ Researcher, May 2007	Leon Rappoport Professor Emeritus of Psychology Kansas State University. Written for CQ Researcher, May 2007

A Who's Who of Shock Jocks

Don Imus (Getty Images/Spencer Platt)

Don Imus began his career as the first true “shock jock” in 1970 at a Cleveland radio station as a DJ. He quickly developed a popular repertoire of comic and raunchy bits such as asking female callers, “Are you naked?”

In the 1990s, the “Imus in the Morning” show gravitated toward news and political talk, with a growing list of influential guests including members of Congress and journalists from major news organizations such as NBC and Newsweek. The show mixed political talk with shock-jock banter. For example, Imus referred to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, a frequent guest, as a “boner-nosed . . . beanie-wearing Jewboy” and described New York Knicks basketball player Patrick Ewing as a “knuckle-dragging moron.”

Imus was fired in April by both CBS Radio and MSNBC television, which had simulcast his radio program to rising ratings, after calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” Fired in the first months of a five-year, $40 million contract, Imus is suing CBS.

Howard Stern (Getty Images/ Evan Agostini)

Radio's second iconic shock jock is Howard Stern, who got his first radio job in 1976 and transitioned into shock-jock stunts gradually a few years later. Stern's specialty is sex talk, though he's also done parodies like “Hill Street Jews.” In 1985 NBC Radio briefly canceled Stern's show over a new segment called “Bestiality Dial-a-Date.”

His employer in the early 1990s, Infinity Broadcasting, racked up $1.7 million in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indecency fines over Stern's show between 1990 and 1993. In 1992, for example, stations carrying Stern earned a $600,000 fine after Stern combined indecency with racial stereotypes when he said “the closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box.”

Despite frequent suspensions, cancellations and station changes, Stern has been employed on radio consistently for more than three decades. Currently he hosts “The Howard Stern Show” on Sirius Satellite Radio.

Douglas Tracht (AFP Photo/ Mario Tama)

Shock talker Doug “Greaseman” Tracht has been an on-air personality since the early 1970s at several East Coast stations. He's most infamous for racist comments he made while working at Washington, D.C.-area stations, where he's spent most of his career.

In 1985, he was widely criticized for saying of the Martin Luther King Day holiday that “they should shoot four more of them and give us a whole week off.” Between 1999 and 2002, Tracht was off the air entirely after he was fired over another racist comment. Tracht's broadcast features often-raunchy on-air skits and stories employing a large cast of fictional characters he developed over the years.

Bubba (www.btls.com)

After two decades on broadcast radio, Bubba the Love Sponge was fired by Clear Channel Communications in 2004 after the FCC fined the company $755,000 based on complaints about Bubba's show, which has featured stunts like butchering a hog on air, shocking guests with electric collars and giving his co-workers a massive dose of laxatives to see who would be the last to move their bowels. Currently the program is carried on Sirius.

Jocks Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia — Opie and Anthony — have migrated from broadcast radio to satellite and back again. Among other incidents, they were fired from a Boston station in 1998 for an April Fool's hoax claiming that Boston Mayor Thomas Merino had been killed in a car crash.

Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano)

In May 2007, in an unusual twist, the two were suspended by the unregulated subscription-radio service XM Satellite Radio but not by the CBS broadcast network, which also airs their show, after they joked about a homeless man raping Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

JV and Elvis — Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay — inhabited shock radio's “The Dog House with JV and Elvis” until their show was canceled by CBS in May 2007, in the wake of Imus' firing. Vandergrift and Lay aired a prank phone call in fake accents to a Chinese restaurant, requesting “shrimp flied lice,” among other Asian-stereotyping jokes. The call — typical fare for the show — was made before Imus made his “nappy-headed hos” comment, but CBS didn't fire the two until after it fired Imus.