Reactionary politics scares weak station manager at local public radio station. The words that were mentioned in two different episodes of The Writer's Almanac that led him to cancel the series: "breast" and "get high." One of my favorite shows, I listened to it many times last year driving in to teach and it would remind me of why I loved literature and reading and sharing my love of literature with others. It inspired me to read more and it transported me to a higher level of thinking. To general manager Tom Godell, you are a coward who shames the University of Kentucky through this gutless abdication of your community role as a public station that seeks to bring the best material it can to its listeners.
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WUKY cancels radio program over offensive content
By Jamie Gumbrecht
HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER
A few weeks after The Boston Globe called The Writer’s Almanac radio program “a confection of poetry and history wrapped in the down comforter voice of producer and host Garrison Keillor,” WUKY-91.3 FM canceled the daily featurette for offensive content.
The five-minute segments aired on the University of Kentucky’s public radio station at 11 a.m. until Aug. 1. It opened with soft piano music and the voice of A Prairie Home Companion’s Keillor remembering major moments in writing history. It was a break for history between news broadcasts and pop music, each day ending with a poem and the wish to “be well, do good work and keep in touch.”
But in a time of Federal Communications Commission crackdowns on radio content, WUKY officials say, the poems Keillor read were too risky for airplay.
“I don’t question the artistic merit, but I have to question the language,” WUKY General Manager Tom Godell said. “It’s not that he’s behaving like Howard Stern, but the FCC has been so inconsistent, we don’t know where we stand. We could no longer risk a fine.”
Reaction to the cancellation has been minimal so far, Godell said. WUKY managers decided to stop carrying the Almanac after a recent spate of language advisories, although they were tracking the content for about a year, Godell said.
The warnings, issued by the program’s production company, came about Curse of the Cat Woman by Edward Field, which contained violent themes and the word “breast”; Thinking About the Past by Donald Justice, which also used the word “breast”; and Reunion by Amber Coverdale, which contained the phrase “get high.” The poems were scheduled for broadcast between July 23 and Aug. 12.
WUKY never heard complaints about The Writer’s Almanac because the station always edited potentially offensive language, Godell said. Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media, the segment’s producer and distributor, do not edit or select the content.
“It’s not a terrible burden to edit, but my concern is that something slips through,” Godell said. “We have certain standards of decency, and I expect our national producers to do the same thing.”
The station vigilantly checks song lyrics for offensive content, Godell said, and broadcasts with language advisories are carefully considered. If offensive language clarifies a story, it will be broadcast, especially when listeners can be warned first. But an FCC sanction would be an embarrassment to the station and the university, Godell said.
Keillor, who will perform Feb. 21 at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, said in an e-mail that stations are within their rights to cancel the Almanac but he’s proud of the poems he reads.
“There isn’t one of them I would hesitate to offer to any high school English class,” Keillor wrote. “The fact that someone is troubled by hearing the word ‘breast’ is interesting, but what are we supposed to do with A Visit From St. Nicholas and the ‘breast of the new fallen snow’? Should it become a shoulder or an elbow? I don’t think so.”
Public broadcasters have long had to edit gratuitous language, but meaningful language is worth a fight, said O. Leonard Press, the retired founding director of Kentucky Educational Television. If stations censor themselves, they might as well become jukeboxes, he said.
“The purpose of public broadcasting is not to be safe, but to be useful, good, to give people something to think about, something to grow on,” Press said. “Survival is not more important than being useful.”
Press, an ardent fan of Keillor’s writing and performing, called the cancellation an overreaction.
“If Garrison Keillor is less desirable on the airwaves than Desperate Housewives,” he said, “we’ve gone a far piece.”
Reach Jamie Gumbrecht at (859) 231-3238 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3238, or jgumbrecht@herald-leader.com
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In other news check out our republican governor who promised to clean up the state capital: way to go Ernie!
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