Posted on 08/28/2002 4:12:47 PM PDT by suspects
Voice of the Common Man
"This is a radio show designed to sell advertising ... [That] means we stick to the issues that the audience really cares about. And if you’re a man 25 to 44, that means getting laid, looking at big tits, getting drunk, smoking a bong hit ..." – Talk show host Tom Leykis, who replaced the Opie & Anthony radio show after they were fired for "indecency."
Opie and Anthony may be stupid, but they’re not dumb. Neither are they “idiots,” “morons” nor “rabid radio retards,” as they’ve been called in print this week. What they are, ladies and gentlemen, are capitalists. And they’re very good ones. They know what the American people want, and they know how to give it to us, good and hard.
So why are so many of us so mad at them?
For close to two weeks now, talking heads and radio “professionals” have filled the press screaming denunciations of Opie and Anthony for their “degrading,” “disgusting” and “offensive” program. This outrage is in response to a contest the two were running that inspired a couple fans to slip into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and engage in the biblical exhortation to “be fruitful and multiply.”
Because there was a service going on in the church at the time, a St. Patrick’s employee wandered by and spotted the less-than-holy rolling pair. After checking to make sure neither fornicator was a duly recognized member of the clergy, the employee contacted the authorities, and the copulating couple was arrested along with a radio producer from the show. Now the Federal Communications Commission is investigating, and Opie and Anthony are temporarily unemployed.
But why were they fired? What did they do wrong?
I ask this question in all seriousness, and from intimately personal and painful experience. In 1999, I was fired from a radio station after making a stupid and offensive on-air comment the day of the Columbine shootings. A primary reason for my dismissal was to demonstrate to the world that I did not have my boss’s permission to be such an idiot on his airwaves.
Opie and Anthony, on the other hand, had everybody’s permission to arrange sex at New York’s most famous cathedral. They announced the contest and its rules weeks earlier. They even had a prominent national sponsor — Sam Adams beer. Churches were specifically mentioned as primo locations for on-air naughtiness as brought to you by the Westwood One Radio Network and Viacom Inc.
People who find the Opie & Anthony show humiliatingly juvenile (that would include me) can kvetch all they want, but the hosts were just doing their job. Their bosses wanted them to have lots of male listeners ages 18 to 34. The bosses didn’t tell Opie and Anthony to get these listeners using their wit, brilliance or thought-provoking style. They just told the two radio talkers to go get ‘em.
And they did. Opie and Anthony snagged huge ratings by, among other things, inviting a woman on the air who offered to have lesbian sex with her daughter in exchange for a Britney Spears ticket and — my personal favorite — holding an on-air celebration when a woman who had been publicly critical of their show was stricken with breast cancer. When her illness forced her to have a radical mastectomy, they invited her on the show for a topless, one-breasted photo shoot. And their ratings soared.
Offering this entertainment to the American public made Opie and Anthony the top revenue generators for WNEW in New York, landed them a national syndication deal and earned them a salary of $4 million a year. And somehow I’m supposed to think Opie and Anthony are the bad guys?
Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that Opie and Anthony are only two people. The reason they were on the air in more than 20 markets — and will be back on again soon — is because there are millions of Americans who want to hear them. Without listeners, without a throng of citizens who hear radical mastectomy jokes and go, “Dude, crank it up!” Opie and Anthony would be spinning records at an obscure 1,000-watt AM in Bangor, Maine.
And yet, for all the holier-than-thou howling, not a single commentator I’ve heard has put the blame for ignorant, low-rent entertainment where it belongs: ignorant, low-rent customers. Opie and Anthony may be gone, but the idiots who find them entertaining are still among us, waiting to be served.
And in the marketplace, no demand goes unfilled. WNEW dropped Opie and Anthony and picked up Tom Leykis, a successful talk-show host who built his reputation by suggesting that men date the victims of child sexual molestation because the victims are more likely to put out. Just a few weeks ago, Leykis went public with the name of a suicidal jumper from a Seattle bridge. He followed that up by posting a web photo of her fall along with an invitation for listeners to submit humorous captions about the plunging body.
Leykis’ specialty is, in his own words, “teaching men how to get laid.” On Politically Incorrect he told women, “We don’t fall in love with you until we get some tail! ... If you think that we hear a word you say before we get in your panties, let me tell you something, we don’t!”
If you’re offended, ladies, get in line ... right behind the literally thousands of women who have shown up at Leykis’ public appearances to get his autograph on their bared breasts.
Based on their public statements, some pundits think that the Opie and Anthony incident exposes a problem in American culture, and they’re right.
They’re just looking on the wrong side of the microphone.
# # #
Michael Graham's new book, REDNECK NATION: HOW THE SOUTH REALLY WON THE WAR will be released by Warner Books in October.
Is it so difficult to understand that BOTH the listeners and the hosts are "the bad guys?"
Ah, take that you Libertarians!
For anyone to defend something like this makes me wonder if Osama bin Laden may be right about us.
Under that thought process I guess selling narcotics, aborting baby's, porn, prostitution, and professional hit men are OK in your book because it gets the big buck. Tell us all where you morally draw the line.
Thanks!
P.S. I have a few good ideas but, I was always afraid of what my family and nieghbors would think of me if I tries to make a buck off of them. Please help me.
Makes me glad to be a particle.
Question: If I badmouth the human race, is that racism?
Yes, but you confuse "people who are without class" with "common" people. They are not the same.
Ah, take that you Libertarians!
Take what? He's right.
I'm a conservative .... NOT a Libertarian!
But I presume you are just another amoral Libertarian, yes?
Agreed.
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