Howard Stern speaking with 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley.
Photo cbsnews.com Howard Stern, who has been hounded by the FCC for strong sexual overtones in his radio talk shows, will not be bound by Federal decency laws any more once he goes live on Satellite radio. He has got a $500 million contract spanning 5 years with Sirius Radio. He says his entire staff will be moving over to Sirius with him.
It has been reported that 1.6 million fans have signed up for the $12.95 monthly service since Stern announced deal with Sirius.
Stern told on 60 minutes that he has hired a woman who is good at phone sex. Every night she will engage in 30 minutes of phone sex with a man amongst his listeners. The interviewer, Ed Bradley, found that sick and he told Stern on his face.
Stern's boundary crossing programing on radio and TV has cost his broadcasting companies $3 million in fines by FCC over the years.
Howard Stern rejects the conventional wisdom that he will be less funny when his bawdy talk show moves to Sirius Satellite Radio next month, where he will no longer be subject to federal decency laws. "People have said to me, 'The FCC is such a good foil for you. You need it.' It's such bullsh--t," he says in the December 12 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, December 5). "My act isn't about saying the FCC sucks. It never has been. It's about going out and talking to people in a real way." Stern also tells Senior Writer Marc Peyser and Correspondent Nicki Gostin that he disagrees with the often-applied label, "shock jock." "If I just went on the air and did shocking things, the show would be over in a month," he says. "It's not about someone getting naked in a studio for me. It's about what drives a person to get naked in a studio, who the hell they are and what makes them tick. It's about honesty."
While walking the halls of Sirius's New York offices, Stern saw rapper 50 Cent with 50-big diamonds, big posse, big smile. 50 Cent gave Stern a hug and quizzed him when he would be on Stern's new program. "I'll bring my own strippers," offered 50 Cent. "I'll bring my own whores," retorted Stern, "and we can really make a show."
One concern that Stern has about his move to satellite radio is his greatly shrunk audience. Sirius has about 2.2 million subscribers whereas Stern's current listeners number 12 million. In recent weeks Stern has fretted repeatedly about his listeners not following him to Sirius, of not being loved enough for them to pay for him. "To me -- and this is a big sickness -- my audience will never be big enough," he says.
But Stern is working on increasing those numbers. For one thing, he's bringing back many of his greatest hits from early in his career, before he racked up millions in FCC fines. Bits like "It's Just Wrong," where fathers and daughters undress each other, and "The Bathroom Olympics," where Howard and his guys race to see who can pee first. He's also thinking seriously about putting cameras in the bathroom that's being built especially for the Wack Pack-Wendy the Retard, High-Pitched Eric, Jeff the Drunk, Cleft Palate and the others who make up Howard's island of misfit toys. If all this seems like a deep shade of blue even by Howard's standards, perhaps that's because he's making up for lost time, write Peyser and Gostin. "The show I'm doing now sucks compared to what I was doing 10 years ago," he says, though he is still No. 1 in New York, L.A. and beyond. "I don't have porn stars on anymore. I haven't had lesbians on for six months. There's no point. You can't ask about their lives." Before the Sirius deal came through a year ago, he was ready to quit radio after 29 years behind the microphone. "He would come in every day and have to work really hard to think about a word that could get on the air, and even then we were having the button pushed on us," says Stern's longtime sidekick Robin Quivers.
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