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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.
I once had a local radio show - medium market. I made a joke about wanting to take the Mayor's wife, cut off her head, and slide her quivering and bleeding neck onto my my erection and shoot my load into her throat and watch it come out her nostrils.
You'd think I'd have been fired, but the mayor called into my show the next day and basically said, "Yeah, I wish I could too." We made a bunch of T-Shirts that said "Marco and the Mayor in the Morning - Raping and Killing Together!" They sold out in a day. We even made a billboard with a closeup of a nose with white substance dripping out of one nostril, and red out of the other. We staged a fake beheading and raping of a goat (PETA was protesting outside the studio), but it was all staged.
Then, later that year I made a comment about Kobe Bryant being a good basketball player because he had twitch-muscles, and I got fired.
Sexual comment on Laura Bush, Condoleeza and the Queen?
I want to know what they said!!!That must be hilarious.
You're the cancer that is killing slashdot.
digg up the parent comment! Or post a link to it on Fark. Or else get an CNET editorial writer to write an article about it.
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.