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XM Satellite Radio Backlash
mrchubbs writes "Sponsors and subscribers to XM Radio are protesting the decision by XM management to suspend the Opie and Anthony show for comments made on an uncensored channel. Subscribers are canceling subscriptions — some estimate that between 20,000 and 40,000 have cancelled. Some are even smashing their radios in protest. Sponsors are pulling ads. Also, there is some evidence of XM not honoring cancellation requests, forcing multiple calls to finally get accounts canceled." Of course this dispute isn't a free-speech issue. "Free speech" refers to a prohibition on censorship by the government; XM is free to do as it wishes with the content it broadcasts, within the law.
And, as The Dixie Chicks found out, the public is free to respond as they see fit.
And things are happening just exactly as they should! It's a free enterprise system and people are voting with their dollars exactly as they should. I'm really happy to see the enormous backlash even if I am a little surprised by it.
Cable TV was supposed to deliver the kind of raw material that the public craves. It wasn't able to sustain it. Satelite radio is supposed to deliver the kind of raw material that the public craves. It has been delivering but the moment someone decides "too far" then they are removing the key value that the public craves.
They should either reverse their decision immediately (for the sake of stock holders!) or go out of business. They no longer offer on their hype and promise... now they are just another radio source and as such, has nothing to offer over terrestrial radio.
(I felt the same way when Dell outsourced its support to other nations... Dell said "everyone's doing it" and I replied, "but that's the advantage Dell had over all the others...their last unique value and now it's gone!")
Calling the channel "Uncensored" is a marketing ploy. Every workplace -- especially radio stations -- have limitations. XM logically figured that an impromptu bit of business in which the US Secretery of State is raped crossed those limitations, particularly since XM's uber-management is in the process of calling in every US government favor it has to grease the skids for a clearly lucrative merger with their lone competitor, Sirius.
It fascinates me that this is framed as a "Free Speech" issue. The airwaves that XM uses aren't of the public variety, it has nothing to do with constitutional amendments.
You know, for a generation raised on digital music, you sure all get caught in the same groove, sounding like broken records, a lot.
in a very roundabout way. The reason XM suspended the show is mainly out of financial self interest; they were afraid that if it seemed like they condoned this type of behavior they would be sued, and they are probably right. The fact that they can be sued over something this banal is the fault of the government. The government can get away with making people afraid to say what they want(no matter how dumb it may be) without directly abridging someone's first amendment rights by awarding huge law suits to whomever feels offended enough to sue. It's still government censorship, but with a better disguise.
Monstar L
It's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with their property.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
If you support the right of adults to pay for and listen to whatever speech they want, I strongly suggest creating your own account to add to their numbers and join in the fun.
We are endowed with natural rights as an intrinsic property of our human nature. The constitution may or may not *recognize* these rights, and it may or may not recognize them in the full scope to which they intrinsically apply - however, a political prisoner in China has the *same rights* as you are I, although his government may not recognize them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights
If those who own the printing presses censor what the rest of us write, we do not have freedom of the press.
If those who own the medium of communication censor what we say, we do not have freedom of speech.
In the market context, freedom of the press is dependent on the existence of a large group of publishers, so that if one publisher refuses to carry what you wish to publish uncensored, you can find another that will. Essentially, this requires a true market (an effectively infinite number of players, low barriers to entry, etc.)
Radio broadcasting is not a market.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Who the hell was advertising on XM? All I hear is ads for gotomypc.com and for other XM shows.
Uncensored only means it's uncensored by the FCC over the F word and topless titty (which, admittedly, isn't a big problem on the radio). But anybody who you sign a contract with is gonna maintain some editorial control over what you do, and if you suddenly started spouting Nazi propaganda, they wouldn't want to be associated with you. Now, we're currently undergoing one of those public hysterias over shock radio, so everybody is hypersensistive, and it's an overreaction in one sense. But....
Mostly what's going on is that shock radio has jumped the shark. It's going out of style, and this is what it looks like. Imus caught some heat, and it turned out he had some listeners but no loyal fans to defend him. Stern went to Sirius and a fraction of his audience followed. It's not that the radio stations are becoming more censorious, it's just that the shows are now disposable, they don't make enough money anymore to make it worth the hassle.
Your definition of "Free Speech" doesn't really matter in this situation.
The real issue is that there are people who actually pay money for, and listen to this program. They want what they want, and right now XM isn't giving it to them.
-- lol pwned
Free speech is not merely the absence of censorship. That is why we built the Web in the first place. A world where only Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch have a voice is not a world of free speech.
There are only two satelite radio systems and there will soon only be one. Even if you are Bill Gates you cannot set up your own because they require a license for the radio band.
So censorship by XM is certainly a free speech issue even if you beleive that only censorship by governments count.
In reality most repressive governments end up outsourcing their censorship. That is how it happens in Iran most of the time. In Russia the Putin regime makes sure that only its allies get to keep a radio or TV license.
This is of course a result of the defenstration of Imus for his racist remarks. Of course Glen Back and Bill O'Riely still spew their filth every day. And the talking heads on the cable networks see absolutely no contradiction between accusing the blogosphere of being 'angry' and 'hate filled', then interviewing someone like Ann Coulter who has just written a book accusing liberals of treason.
The difference between the Opie/Anthony and Imus situations is that Imus targeted a bunch of college kids with racial abuse. Opie and Anthony made fun of three powerful women, all of whom are fair game.
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It's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with their property.
I consider myself rather cynical, but even I wouldn't call employees "property".
More importantly, though, "those other people" don't exist as people! Call me crazy, but I strongly believe that real live humans should have far, far more rights than fictional legal entities.
Why, you might ask?
Simple - You can't imprison a corporation (and only rarely do we imprison the leaders thereof; lookup "hydra" on Wiki for an idea of the effectiveness of that). You can't kill a corporation (well, you can, but in 230 years of abuse by our corporate masters, the government has only used it a very, very small number of times, and never for actual "crimes" such as Bhopal - No, they've used it in reponse to manipulations of another legal fiction, the economy). You can't meaningfully impose any punishment on a corporation, beyond fines (which with very, very few exceptions amount to nothing more than a nuissance, "just the cost of doing business").
So, that leaves us with entities with the rights of real live humans, with absolutely no morals, a single-minded obsession with profit, and no reason to fear serious punishment.
So yeah, I damned well do think we should have the right to tell these legal fictions what they can and can't do with "their" property - Starting with not allowing them to own property in the first place.
No, "free speech" refers to our inalienable right to speak freely, limited only by restrictions on harm it does to others.
The Constitution does not constrain only the government. This kind of thinking comes from the basic fallacy that "the Constitution gives us certain rights". No: we have certain rights, and we people create the government to protect those rights as described in the Constitution.
For example, you cannot keep slaves on your private plantation. There are many other Constitutional controls that obviously do not stop at your property line.
There is, however, the right to control one's own private property, primarily by controlling access to it by other people. And there is the middle ground, private property to which access is granted to the public, even by degrees (eg. from a parking lot to a shopping mall to a diner to a private club to an invite-only house party).
And then there's the in-fact results of the exact circumstances of private owners prohibiting certain rightful actions. If only one club prohibits speech, and there are plenty of other venues, then that club is not suppressing the rights. But if every venue for speech is private, and prohibits speech (or every golf course prohibits Germans), then that prohibition is suppressing the rights, and the government has business removing the infringement on the rights.
Satellite radio is an exclusive (literally - it excludes nonsubscribers) club, but it's offered to the public. And, especially since the Sirius/XM merger, it's a very limited venue. There's some worthwhile debate of whether alternate media offer alternate venues, like Internet and broadcast radio. Today they do, since satellite radio is a small audience that is also reachable with audio telecasts. But they might have a majority audience, or perhaps one demographic segment of its audience is large and otherwise not reachable. A future lawsuit might have to decide on the actual situation.
Opie and Anthony have a contract, in which it surely states what speech can get them thrown off the air. Subscribers have contracts which surely state what content can be removed suddenly and without warning. Those terms are enforceable, without violating the Constitution. Not because there is free speech as unlimited as in a public park - and certainly not because the government has no jurisdiction in the encrypted satellite band.
But because of how our actual rights are protected by the actual situation, in its real details. When our rights are at stake, the Constitution is there to protect them. But not when someone's just waving the Constitution because they didn't get the entertainment they can get elsewhere.
--
make install -not war
I consider myself rather cynical, but even I wouldn't call employees "property".
Neither would I. However, XM owns a bunch of microphones, and they get to decide in which direction they want to point them. The microphones are their property.
There are two kinds of censorship:
1) The kind done by governmental bodies, which has the force of law, and is often constrained itself by "free speech" guarantees. That's de jure censorship.
2) The kind done by private entities, which can be legally circumvented, but which can go beyond what the government is allowed to do. That's de facto censorship.
Each of these is a Bad Thing. If the government is non-democratic, de jure censorship is inherently destructive to the betterment of society, and infringes on the rights of the individual, because there's no way to effectively challenge it. If the private entity is a monopoly or has insufficient competition*, or if it is highly influential (e.g. religious bodies), de facto censorship can be just as bad, for the same reason. So saying "that's not censorship; it's not the government" is missing the point, and offering rather cold comfort to anyone who has had their work suppressed or their reading/entertainment options limited by self-appointed censors.
*Whether that applies is this case is certainly subject to debate, and I don't have a strong opinion on that point; I'm talking about the general principle.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Free speech is the right do say what you believe without fear of (pretty broadly) being stripped of your freedom because of it (meaning incarceration, death...)
If you guys are going to argue that anybody who owns a medium should have no control over its editorial line, you are seriously wrong, IMO.
Granted, you cannot expect to be able to speak up without *any* form of consequence, but that's a private citizen issue. The only thing the first amendment assures you is that the government will not prevent you from speaking (and should protect your life from the results of such speech I guess).
As some pointed out here, the issue here is what XM promised to deliver and if it held up to it. If not, then paying customers are gonna leave them and that's the end of it.
Opie and Anthony were hired because of that kind of stunts, and XM knew what to expect from them.
Nobody here has any idea of what limitations XM gave to them and if they went over them. If there is a breach of contract or whatever issue of that kind, let them deal with that in court.
But please do not start saying that a news-paper/TV station/radio should publish anything without control over their own publication, because it's not true.
That's not a nick, that's my NAME.
3) They are supposed to be grossly racist and offensive, so any complaints about it should be ignored.
Bingo. XM hired these guys to do pretty much exactly what they did. XM's commercials even bragged about how they their various celebrity shock-jocks could get away with saying anything, unlike their broadcast-radio counterparts.
Incidentally, I felt the same way about the Imus scandal, though in that case at least the use of publically broadcast radio made FCC intervention a possibility - XM doesn't even have that thin of an excuse.
The editor obviously confuses the right to free speech granted by the constitution (that the federal government won't infringe the right of free speech) as being synonymous with the abstract concept of free speech. It's clear from the wording that the drafters of the constitution were aware that the right itself and the protection afforded by the constitution were synonymous, however this seems to have been lost somewhere.
Censorship is a free speech issue, no matter who is performing the censorship. Whether it's the federal or state government, or a private corporation, preventing people exercising the right to free speech makes no difference. The only difference is that it's only a constitutional matter if the federal government is involved.
(Disclaimer: I am not an American, nor a lawyer)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think it's time we got off this childish and meaningless deliniation between huge centralized corporate power and governments.
Back in the days of our forefathers the king was also in control of business through either direct control of resources or indirect control over charters and taxes. Now corporations have multinational presence, and force governments to "compete" for the boosts to gdp they offer with bought legislation.
Many corporations have more assets than developing word nations, and bill gates could easily fund an army to seize half of africa if he wished, but corporate weasels learn well from the past and are now content to manipulate the puppet strings and cry "private property" whenever groups call a spade a spade.
When clearchannel controls more than half the radio market they carry as much or more power than government, and need to be held responsible for censorship.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You are not qualified to say what is and isn't "right" about what can be said on TV and radio.
You might be grossly offended by a rape joke, I might simply not find it amusing, someone else might chuckle.
We all have different moral standards.
As another example, what about insulting someone's religion? I couldn't give a shit if a broadcaster goes on a rampage against Christianity, but the Archbishop of Canterbury would clearly disagree with me.
Stop allowing others to censor what you don't like, just don't watch it.
</liberal rant>
Silly me.
If you're talking about the Bush comment above - please go read a book. Bush is from Connecticut. NOT Texas. I am from Texas.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Bingo, and this is the reason that Howard Stern will never be treated similarly on Sirius. Where Opie & Anthony's impact on subscriber numbers can be measured in the thousands, Howard Stern was and is a key factor in the satellite radio decision of millions. Heck, Sirius gave Stern a bonus of $80 million less than a year into his contract because of the huge jump in subscriber numbers they feel they got from his show.
I suspect that the situation was similar with Imus. Nothing he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team was any more offensive than thousands of comments made by him and his cronies in the past. It was just that a) this time there was a public backlash and b) he doesn't bring in the listeners that he once did. If his employers still considered him vital to their business he would have gotten his suspension and then been right back on the air.
None of that, though, is to say that XM acted properly in this situation. While I don't care about Opie & Anthony (their previous controversies turned me off, I wasn't a morning talk listener and I've since become a Stern listener), XM at the very least implied by hiring them and tolerating them up until now that the show was to be uncensored. If you're going to make that claim, then I think you have to back it up, even if they're taking shots at management (maybe even especially then) - at least until the contracts are up when you can just let them go. I feel similarly about the Imus firing in that his employers knew what they were getting into every time they gave him a new contract.