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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.
The government grants private monopolies for speech over the airwaves supposedly for the "public interest", but really for the corporate elite that run America. You don't have the right to broadcast audio speech over radio waves at frequencies and strengths that would give you a mass audience unless you pay massive licensing fees that are prohibitive to any working class individual. This means that religion and capitalism maintain their cruel grip on the consciousness of the American public through manufactured deceptions on a massive scale. AM, FM, Satellite, it's all the same. How anyone can justify this by saying that it's a "free market" that lets people "vote with their dollars" is beyond me. How can "voting with your dollars" be democratic? One class of people have literally billions of these dollar-votes at their disposal while another has negative dollar-votes (debit). We need social democratic management of the means of speech in a mass society. True free speech can only prosper when both the right to speak and the right to be heard is available to all equally.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Sexual comment on Laura Bush, Condoleeza and the Queen?
I want to know what they said!!!That must be hilarious.
I'm attempting to consolidate my replies.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.