Though it would nary raise an eyebrow in other parts of the world you've probably read that Joe Scarborough got in trouble for dropping the "F-bomb" on his show: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Post_Fbomb_Scarborough_placed_on_sevensecond_1111.html
On November 1st a local radio host, Karel, on KGO dropped the "F-bomb" three times by accident on a news break when he thought his mic was off. He does his show remote from Los Angeles in a room where he lives and the board operator had taken a potty break but forgot to turn off the remote feed. ABC News (which has annoying news readers IMO) had a story about Joe the Plumber and Karel, like me, was getting tired of hearing about Joe and let off the expletives which went out over the air. Karel and the board operator were fired yesterday. Joe Scarborough keeps his gig but MSNBC has put a 7 second delay on him. Let's see Scarborough is conservative and Karel, who is openly gay, liberal, and very popular in his time slot gets fired. KGO's Gene Burns during his 7 PM show last night had Karel on briefly so he could say goodbye to his audience. Karel mentioned he has gotten more flack from the left than the right over this. Ariana Huffington has dropped his blog articles. On the ba.broadcast newsgroup which is populated by many local broadcast people (engineers, hosts and producers) I started a topic on Scarborough's F-bomb compared with Karel's (Scarborough is on a cable not broadcast network and is not under FCC regulation). I thought I was going to get trashed for mentioning how backward America is when it comes to this stuff but instead I got a lot of agreement. Even Gene Burns on his show last night was of the opinion that American needs to "grow up." One point being brought up is that Kevin Martin the young current chairman of the FCC wants to expand their influence to the Internet and cable. Let's lobby Obama to fire this brat's ass. KGO's press release: http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=979729&spid=15884 Karel's web site. Karel DID mention he has already gotten offers from other stations including ones in the Bay Area. I would suspect KKGN which is the local Air America Radio outlet and maybe the NovaM network who picked up Randi Rhodes after AAR fired her for blasting Hillary at a weekend show (not radio) in San Francisco. http://radiokrl.com/
