Anthony's thoughts on the FCC and the Broadcast Decency Hearings

[Sloats]

I thought Shiffen HATED the boys, be he fucking NAILED it right here:

I think it needs to be pointed out, again, that the real problem in this case is that the incident was broadcast in the middle of a football game. The audience expectation, under these circumstances, was that it was not going to be subjected to sexually explicit content. If this was a late night show or a situation comedy known for sexual innuendo, the expectation level would be different.

When you listened to O&A, you knew what you were going to get. If you allowed your kids to listen to something you either knew (or should have known) was explicit then it's you who has a problem. O&A never cloaked what they did. In fact, they bragged about it. It was essentially \"listen to us because we're going to push the limits\".

The Superbowl was not the forum for Timberlake to pull Jackson's shirt off because of the context of the program. That's the real issue and it keeps getting missed in this discussion.

Finally, I want to point out something else with respect to O&A. For the last year and a half their show has been characterized as nothing more than one outrageous stunt after another. I'm beginning to think that even some of their fans are forgetting what really made the show work.

It wasn't the stunts (and there really weren't that many of them). It was their ability to bring their audience into the show and identify with them as everyday guys who you would like to hang out with. I don't think I ever heard a show that did that as well as they did. You wanted to be in on what was happening because you liked them. It wasn't so much that they had a stripper in the studio as it was they were having such a good time with the audience talking about it. It was a show of *inclusion*, not a show of exclusion.

There have been and will continue to be lots of radio shows around that pull pranks and have strippers in the studio. Very few if any will have the success that O&A did because it's *not* about the stunt. It's about the way you get your audience to like you and identify with you and consider you a friend. That's what all good radio is no matter what the topic is. It's time that we remember that about O&A and stop focusing on the stunts the show did. In the big picture, those things were only tools to create the feeling that show created.

I guess he did like the show.