Gov’t Crackdown On College Radio

From the The College Media Journal  online: "I’d rather have a boring station than no station at all." With 13 years of hindsight and constant reminders of his station’s occasional indiscretions, WSUC’s current station manager Christopher Ortega can’t take any chances. On June 21, 1992, a student DJ at SUNY-Cortland’s WSUC played Kid Rock’s "Yo-Da-Lin In The Valley," which explicitly describes one of the Kid’s favorite sexual acts. All it took was this one mid-afternoon lapse in judgment, and the school owed the US government $23,750 (later reduced to a little over four grand for complying with the FCC)."

"As if Ortega isn’t facing enough internal pressure from his faculty, the House Of Representatives is proposing a bill tentatively titled the "Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act Of 2005," that would raise the roof on fines to $500,000, while adding personal culpability for DJs, musicians and anyone else freely expressing him or herself on public airwaves. The Senate has yet to approve the bill—its current revision brings the maximum fine down to a "modest" $325,000 and doesn’t include any personal culpability clause— but if it does, it could spur an arctic chill on free expression in broadcasting."

Read the full aticle here.