How Did We Get Here?
A group of Roman Catholics are seeking to have WNEW-FM's license revoked. As part of a WNEW contest, two listeners had (or simulated) sex in a vestibule of St. Patrick's Cathedral while a WNEW producer in the church described what was happening on the air via a cell phone. Understandably, many Catholics were offended. There is no excuse for this absurdly public desecration of a space that is sacred to millions.
All three (the producer and the porn stars) were arrested, but I don't think that the chain of responsibility ends there. The disc jockeys on whose show this occurred are of course responsible as well, as is the station--not just because they're responsible for whatever they broadcast, but because they specifically hired these disc jockeys to do this sort of thing. The disc jockeys have been fired in Massachusetts for inappropriate behavior, and they have been fined by the FCC during their tenure at WNEW. I would imagine that the publicity stemming from these incidents were worth far more to the disc jockeys and WNEW than the cost of the firing and the fines. WNEW cannot credibly claim that this latest incident was unexpected--they hired these disc jockeys to do exactly this sort of thing. They have all been enriched at the expense of the erosion of community standards (otherwise known as manners).
That said, I don't think that WNEW's license should be revoked. Legal action will never be an effective response to a lack of manners. And I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of this incident by referring to it as a "mere" lack of manners. Manners are vital to civilization, and the fact that I feel I have to point out that I'm not minimizing this issue by placing it in the realm of manners shows just how poorly regarded manners have become. We have replaced simple manners with litigation. The bulk of those actions that find their way into the courts grow out of a failure of manners. But legal action will never be effective in this role. By its very nature, litigation further undermines good manners. So all of the laws directed at public smoking or cell phone use (no matter how exasperating soaring healthcare costs and hearing one half of asinine conversations may be) and all of the calls for this or that legislative or regulatory action are not going to make things better--they'll just make us all more litiguous and adversarial until we all mutually agree that manners matter.
9:29:18 PM 
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