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NEWS UPDATE
| Below is a brief comment from USA Today, August 31, 1998 regarding the Howard Stern's TV Show: |
... "After just two weeks on the air, it has been canceled in Canada, attacked by parents' groups and slapped with a precedent-breaking TV-MA rating (for mature audiences) - which probably pleases the publicity-addicted Stern to no end.
Saturday's second show included no more than a few minutes' worth of made-for-TV material; the rest was simply clips of his famed radio show, shot with all the skill of your average
cable-access program.
The only name guest this week was Wesley Snipes, who allowed himself to be led into a discussion of probing into body parts. Note to stars: There's a difference between being a good sport and being a partner in bad taste - a line that's crossed pretty much the moment you agree to appear with Stern.
A good part of the show was devoted to a young man's on-air attempt to break the "world farting record."
As terrible as that may sound, it was a welcome relief from "Gary the Retard's Dial-a-Date," a Dating Game parody designed to demean both Gary and the Special Olympics participant he
was steered to as a date.
Even more dehumanizing, if that's possible to imagine, was the "Frankenstein Makeover" contest - a twisted Queen for a Day in which women competed to see who was most badly in need of plastic surgery.
It's a class act all the way.
These slimeball antics may be funny on radio (though I doubt it), but on TV, where you can see the women's faces as they're badgered, insulted and asked to bare their breasts, it is a sick form of psychological torture.
If the joke is supposed to be the incongruity of these unattractive men judging others on their appearance, it doesn't work: The women are too powerless and the jokes too cutting for it to
be funny.
But then surely I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. Stern's latest TV incarnation is just another outing for the same old tired cut, with Stern once again playing the creepy geek who has to bully women to let him come on to them. Is there anyone left who can be surprised, let alone shocked?
It is, however, still possible to be depressed. We all knew people in high school who found it amusing to be this cruel. You'd like to think they'd outgrow it, or at least not find a way to make money from it.
As for CBS, you might hope the network would see the long-term risk of trading its reputation for ratings - but apparently you'd be wrong. ...." |
OCTOBER 1998:
BROADCASTING & CABLE DELIVERS WARNING TO TV STATIONS AIRING STERN
(http://www.nypostonline.com/entertainment/5788.htm) |
HOWARD Stern has lost one of his biggest defenders - the staunchly pro-business trade
magazine Broadcasting & Cable, which yesterday warned TV stations about airing Stern's
raunchy TV show.
Under the headline Harvest of Shame, B&C - considered the bible of the broadcasting
industry - lambasts both Stern and CBS for such bad-taste stunts as showing Stern shaving a
woman's pubic area.
This was just a bit too much, said B&C editor Harry Jessell, noting that Stern's syndicated
radio show - thebasis for TV's The Howard Stern Radio Show - is just not translating well to
TV, in our opinion.
We're not saying anyone ought to take the show off, and we don't want the FCC to act, he
said. But we think TV stations airing the show ought to take a second look at this show.
The Howard Stern Radio Show airs on 12 CBS-owned stations, including WCBS/Ch.2.
Radio Show is syndicated by CBS' Eyemark Entertainment.
Stern is free to shock, nauseate or be cruel for the entertainment of his audience, the
scathing editorial says. CBS is free to abet him and collect the money. It's all about freedom and artistic expression and giving an audience what it wants.
It's also just a little bit about the CBS eye pressed up against one of those quarter peep show
machines in Times Square.
Jessell called the Harvest of Shame editorial a very rare step for the magazine to take.
We don't do this very often but ... we've sort of built up to this with a couple of other editorials
where we've talked about CBS' right to produce and air the show, Jessell said. We've been
defending Stern for years and years and he even credited us in one of his books with
standing up for him.
A CBS spokesman said the network had no comment.
The Howard Stern Radio Show - a videotaped version of Stern's syndicated radio program -
debuted on Aug. 22 to big ratings.
Since then, the show's ratings have declined and seven stations - some citing content,
others low ratings - have axed the show. [New York Post] |
| A Detroit Free columnist said it well: I wanted to get in the car, round up my children and bring them to the only place I can assure they'll be safe: home with me. |
Detroit Free Press
.... Our only choice is to detoxify the environment and give our
children -- especially our troubled boys -- the social, cultural, educational and spiritual guidance they crave. |
| WXRC, Charlotte, NC, PROGRAM DIRECTOR: "There's no secret that it's an expensive show," says Bowen. "The challenge in the South is in his acceptance level to the advertisers." |
WXRC is the only North Carolina station carrying the "Howard Stern Show" following Cumulus Media station WRCQ (103.5 FM)'s recent decision to drop the show.
WXRC program director Ron Bowen says his station has no intention of dropping Stern, though he admits it can be a challenge to make a show like Stern's profitable.
"There's no secret that it's an expensive show," says Bowen. "The challenge in the South is in his acceptance level to the advertisers."
http://www.radiodigest.com/charlotte/news/2000/cha_021100_graham2.htm |
[Washington Post, February 4, 1999]
http://www.washingtonpost.com |
WBDC (Washington DC) is dumping Howard Stern.
Washington's WB affiliate station has decided it won't renew its pact to air the
"Howard Stern Radio Show," currently on Saturdays at midnight. WBDC will continue to air
the shock jock's television show until its contract is up, in August. The reason: The station
can't sell ads in the show and is losing money on the deal. "We've opted not to pick it up," said station President and General Manager Michael Nurse. "We are not pleased with the economic performance of the show." Nurse said, "It's been a disappointment in terms of its programming quality and it's extremely difficult to sell -- a lot of advertisers don't want to be associated with the controversy." ... |
ENTERTAINMENT NEWS -- Minneapolis/St. Paul
Published: Sunday, April 11, 1999
www.pioneerplanet.com/justgo/entnews/tvr_docs/017871.htm
Howard's End
It's over. Radio juggernaut Howard Stern has lost in the Twin Cities, one of his biggest failures ever. A band of Disney stations out-foxed ``the king of all media,'' mimicking the potty-mouthed style and the music programming.
The battle of radio titans
Howard Stern and radio station Rock 100, owned by Chancellor (which also owns KFAN, Cities97, K102, KDWB and KOOL 108).
Tom Barnard's ``Morning Show'' on KQRS, a ABC/Disney property, along with the Zone stations (105.1, 105.3 and 105.7), and KXXR-FM (93X).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRIAN LAMBERT MEDIA CRITIC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
As quotes go, it may not be as infamous as ``I did not have sexual relations with that woman'' or ``Read my lips. No . . . new . . . taxes.'' But Andy Bloom's boast in the spring of 1997 that ``in 18 months Howard Stern will be the No. 1 radio show in the Twin Cities'' is still uniquely memorable.
Especially now that Stern has so clearly tanked in St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Bloom, the 37-year-old former operations manager for WRQC-FM (``Rock 100''), is out of a job.
This week, Stern wraps two years in the Twin Cities market. His audience share is decreasing steadily. He has another year left on his contract with Rock 100 (owned by giant, Texas-based Chancellor Broadcasting).
Meanwhile, Bloom is polishing his resume. Lacking a dramatic improvement, Stern will be dropped by Rock 100 no later than next April. If Chancellor/Rock 100 decides to cut bait any earlier with Stern, they'll still have to pay him something close to $500,000 for 1999-2000. Bloom, on the other hand, says he's OK financially until Dec. 31.
So Bloom sits in the Lincoln Del out in St. Louis Park, where he used to work as a kid, and shakes his head. ``If Howard Stern doesn't work against Tom Barnard, I don't know what will. We did everything to make him work here, and he might still, but it sure doesn't look like it.''
While the decision to bring in Stern wasn't Bloom's to make, it was his job to make it work. To that end, he was given a huge TV and promotional budget. It was Bloom who blanketed the town with those eye-catching/appallingly sexist billboards you see hanging out over every freeway and major intersection. No expense was spared on behalf of the Stern-Barnard competition.
``If you ask me, they fired the wrong guy,'' says Ed Levine, a man who has both programmed and programmed against Stern, and is now president of the Radio Group, a collection of nine stations in upstate New York.
``They should have fired Stern. Andy took the bullet, but it's Stern who hasn't done what they paid him to do.''
What Stern was paid to do is beat, or at the very least beat down, KQRS-FM's Tom Barnard . . . in Barnard's home town.
He hasn't even come close.
Judged by audience share, Barnard is the most dominant morning-drive-time act in any major market in the country. Since Stern's arrival in April '97, Barnard has suffered marginal losses among several audience groups, most noticeably the younger males Stern was supposed to bring to Rock 100 in droves. But the disparity remains so large in Barnard's favor, three and four times Stern's numbers in some key categories, that the effect is negligible.
Meanwhile, after two years, the size of Stern's audience in the Twin Cities has peaked and is dwindling. Rock 100 General Manager Marc Kalman, a 30-year veteran of Twin Cities radio, insists he'll stay the course with Stern through next April. Beyond that, he's not promising anything.
``For now, we're going ahead with Howard,'' says Kalman.
Bottom line: Barnard won. Stern lost. And the ``experts'' are trying to figure out why.
``If Andy doesn't know how to beat Barnard, I doubt anybody knows,'' says Tom Taylor of the respected industry newsletter, the M Street Journal.
``Andy's a master. He knows Howard as well as anyone. He's the guy who brought Stern into Philadelphia in 1986 and L.A. in 1991. Two very successful moves. He knows Howard is Howard, and sometimes it takes a while for him to build up some traction in a market. But in Minneapolis and St. Paul, he's up against some very smart opposition, in (KQRS' program director) Dave Hamilton and a company (Disney) with a lot of assets to throw up in defense of the mothership (Barnard).'' (Dave Hamilton did not return calls for this story.)
Here are the most popular theories for why Stern flopped in the Twin Cities.
One: ``The playbook was out on Stern,'' also known as, ``Chancellor waited too long.''
Chancellor dithered a year and half or more before bringing Stern into this market. That long run-up and the inevitability of Stern's insertion into the Twin Cities radio landscape gave Hamilton, Barnard and KQ more than enough time to counter the move.
Their strategy was to tweak Barnard's act slightly but discernibly ``bluer.'' Which is to say they rendered it even more like Stern than it was, with an even greater (for KQ) focus on adolescent sex and obsessions with penises, breasts and toilets to defuse any titillation factor attached to the new bad boy in town.
Says Levine, who programmed Stern for WJFK-FM in Washington, D.C., ``Howard always has more trouble in markets where there's an established bad-boy act, even if it's derivative. Still, it's rare to see him get stomped as badly as he's getting stomped in (the Twin Cities).''
``They can deny it all they want,'' says Bloom, ``but in the last three years, including the year before Stern came in here, Barnard got significantly bluer than he's ever been before. It's a long way from, `Yo mama,' to `penis.'
While Barnard and company clearly knew what a penis was before Stern's arrival, the perception is they started throwing it around a lot more just prior to it.
Two: Stern didn't spend enough time attacking Barnard directly.
Conversely, Barnard and KQ successfully avoided rising to a counter-attack.
Listeners to Stern's first few weeks here will recall the regular, if somewhat perfunctory, slashes Stern, via his national show, would make against Barnard way out in little old Minneapolis-St. Paul.
It was a strange thing to hear; Stern accusing Barnard of ripping off his act and being a cheap imitation. Why, you had to wonder, would anyone in New York or Los Angeles know or possibly care who Tom Barnard is?
But the highly personalized attack is a strategy that has served Stern well elsewhere. Most notably in Philadelphia, where he destroyed then-kingpin John DeBella in the late '80s. It worked again in Los Angeles in the early '90s, where he tore into ``Mark & Brian.''
But by the time Stern got to the Twin Cities in 1997, he was a major celebrity, wealthy beyond his fondest dreams. He was an established national act, playing in roughly 30 major markets. He attacked Barnard, but there wasn't much heat or fire to it. Stern's slashing sounded about as heartfelt as your average pro-wrestling taunt.
And then he stopped completely. The Twin Cities faded into the blur of markets carrying Stern's show. Why waste valuable air time on Barnard that he could vent on Don Imus? Or regional competitors like Mancow in Chicago? Or Brother Wease in Rochester, N.Y.?
``The No. 1 rule is `Don't respond. Ever. Don't take the bait. Don't take Howard on mano a mano,' '' says M Street Journal's Taylor. ``If you do, he's got you, and he's like a Husquvarna (chain saw) through your ratings.''
KQRS adapted that strategy and stuck to it, even when it meant being snickered at by media writers chiding them for timidity in the face of the only real enemy they were ever going to face. To this day, Barnard has never mentioned Stern's name on the air. (Several KQ execs did not return phone calls from us.)
``Yah,'' says Taylor, who is based in nearby southern New Jersey. ``DeBella (the Philadelphia competitor) wrote the book on what not to do in a battle with Stern. He came back at him. Called Stern all sorts of names and promised to crush him in Philly. Stern's response was to personally attack him day after day after day.
''And in the end, Stern crushed him. The irony now is that DeBella sort of made himself over as a talk jock, and now he's on the same station as Stern.''
Three: KQRS out-programmed Bloom's music on Rock 100.
Radio programmers sound like glazey-eyed herbalists when they talk about formulas for successful music formats. For ``alternative,'' you add in a little Alanis Morissette or Shawn Colvin, and maybe drop some stale R.E.M. Three more cuts each afternoon of AC/DC, and suddenly you're ``Active Rock.'' Two more cuts of the Rolling Stones, and you're ``Classic Rock.''
So went Rock 100. Headbanging ``Active Rock'' one day, ``Classic Rock that really rocks'' the next. Ninety-five percent of us couldn't tell the difference.
But Bloom's frustration was that Hamilton and ABC/Disney were prepared to counter him at every turn, tweaking and re-tweaking both the three low-powered ``Zone'' stations and KXXR-FM (a.k.a. ``93X'' -- formerly ``The Edge'') to block Rock 100 and protect Tom ``The Mothership'' Barnard.
For his constant shifting, Bloom was criticized by colleagues within Chancellor's Twin Cities' properties. ``He f----- up the music,'' one said. ``He was all over the map. It never made any sense.''
Others, including Bloom, doubt the music makes all that much difference in the final analysis.
``The thing with Howard is that he is over-powering. He becomes the image of your radio station,'' Bloom says. ``There is no perfect way to re-cycle him, and in retrospect, it didn't make a hell of a lot of difference.'' ``Re-cycle'' is industry jargon for transporting Stern's audience to the rest of the station's programming.
``There are Howard Stern classic-rock stations. Howard Stern active-rock stations. Howard Stern alternative stations and Howard Stern talk stations. Arguably, talk slightly does the best job of re-cycling him.''
Slightly.
``My background is research, and I've programmed Howard Stern for 13 years,'' Bloom continues. ``In any format that you choose to do, best-case scenario, 30 to 40 percent of the people who like that music hate Howard Stern. As soon as they get another radio station that'll play the kind of music, they, like, they don't need you, anymore.
``So by duplicating everything we did -- and man, they (93X) danced right in my footsteps -- they made damn sure we lost those people. It was pretty brilliant, really. But you have to be prepared to waste a radio station to do it, which Disney was prepared to do. It's an awesome thing to see, them blowing up a $20 million station like `The Edge.'
``But the job was to protect Barnard,'' Bloom says, ``even if it meant Disney's group of stations here lost market share, which is exactly what happened.''
At the end of the winter quarter of 1997 (roughly January through March), the five-station, ABC-Disney FM-music group's combined share of Twin Cities 18-to-34-year-old men in morning drive was a stunning 54.4 percent.
By January 1999, that share had eroded to a still stupendous 40.6 percent. KQ had lost 25 percent of its 18-to-34-year-old male audience, while 93X lost slightly more than 20 percent of the same group that was listening in the last days of ``The Edge.''
Meanwhile, the six local Chancellor properties (Rock 100, KFAN, Cities97, K102, KDWB and KOOL 108) increased their market share among the same demographic group in morning drive, from 23.4 to 31.9 percent.
``But the thing with Stern,'' Ed Levine says, ``is that the show is so expensive and so controversial, with so many advertisers refusing to be a part of it, you can't afford for it to be just a well-rated show. It has to be kick-a--.
``Fussing around with the music is like putting a Band-Aid on a head wound. The issue is Stern.''
Finally, four: Stern isn't the act he once was.
Both Barnard and Stern are now in their late 40s. While they might talk the talk of rageful, tumescent adolescence, issues of age and financial security prevent them from walking the walk like they did in their younger days. In Minnesota, even if his private personality and lifestyle insulates him from his fans, Barnard has the enormous advantage of being from here. (Guys like John DeBella and Mark & Brian were transplants to their respective markets).
Then you factor in the matters of Disney's cannon-fodder stations and Barnard's willingness and ability to downshift into Stern-mode prior to Stern's arrival.
But Stern?
``Howard is still a brilliant satirist when he's talking about his family or his own experiences,'' Levine says. ``But if I hear one more stripper, or one more woman with three breasts, or one more lesbian, I'm going to scream.
``The thing is, Howard is now 45 and he's worth tens of millions of dollars, and that changes a person. It really does, and we all know it. He can be brilliant, like I say. But his experiences these days don't have much in common with his audience.
``At times, he sounds like a caricature of himself. Too many of things he talks about used to be real to him. Now he's pretending this is his life.'' |
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