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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.
That's why I performed the ultimate protest and never signed up with them in the first place.
I'm glad this situation validates my accidental act of protest.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Problems with XM? Surely you can't be Sirius. ;-)
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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 hardly a censorship issue. XM, as a private company can hire ad fire whoever they like
I hear this argument a lot - That doesn't make it any more accurate.
It very much still counts as censorship - Just not the "protected" kind that the government can't do.
Yes, Sirius has the legal power to get rid of any of their employees, within the terms of their employees' contracts and various antidiscrimination laws. But that doesn't make it right, and we need to stop putting up with crap like this, much less justifying it with "as a private company...".
This happened to me... XM is definitely messing with people's accounts. I canceled my service about a year ago, but a few months after canceling they started charging my card again. I can't think of a worse way to treat a customer. If someone charges your card out of the blue just because they have your account info, they are committing credit card fraud.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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>
-George Carlin
You can't take the sky from me...
I love this story, on so many levels. This is the first of its kind that I've seen. You always read about and expect stories like the Don Imus firing, (who, by the way, is suing CBS. Good luck to him.) or how someone is fined hundreds of thousands of US$ for saying the F-word, or "massive uproar" over split-second bairly-visible nip slips. But here we have the anti-censorship crowd doing exactly what the paranoid networks feared would come from the other side. I hope this is the start of a new revolution.
When did we get to the point where everything has to revolve around the opinions of a few overzealous religious-right middle-aged stay-at-home mothers who lived their whole lives inside a bubble and have too much time on their hands? [I have a sister who's just like that] For one, I don't think these people are going to change brands of toothpaste because their favorite brand sponsors a show that drops S-bombs and F-bombs on a regular basis. I also don't think these people will be buying any high-end cars or other luxury products, so those sponsors are safe. No sane person would boycott any sort of medication or medical treatment over this. The only potential advertisers affected might be those selling lower-end cars, SUVs(mainly), and perhaps any product that requires some amount of forethought. I'm sure there's a few obsessive individuals who will write down the names of every product that sponsors an offensive show and avoid them, but these are considerably rare.
Keeping this from becoming too off-topic, what Opie and Anthony fans can do is this: Take a brief look at the advertisers who pulled out in opposition of censorship. If they sell anything big that you plan on purchasing, remember to tell the salesperson (or probably better, write the company a letter with a photocopy of your receipt) that you went with them because they supported Opie and Anthony. (or free speech, but at least mention Opie and Anthony) I already plan to do the same because a (different) radio show that I love came under fire awhile back, and their main sponsor stood up for them. So my next mattress is coming from that sponsor. This is turning the tables on what networks and sponsors expect from consumers, and in doing so we may change their views on censorship.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
So what did they actually say? Here's the transscript I've been able to dig up. Charlie is some character called "homeless charlie".
I've never listened to Opie and Anthony, nor do I subscribe to sat radio, but I have to say it's a lot less offensive than I imagined from the little "raping Condi Rice, Laura Bush, and the Queen" summary I've read. It's really not any worse talk than you'd hear a few guys in a bar saying.
I guess I have to agree with the comment that the suspension was really more about trying to appease any government contacts that Sirius/XM has to grease the wheels on the (IMO really bad for the public) merger between the two.
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