This is a victory over the mean-minded who objected to - it seems - one word and one phrase in a radio broadcast in America. I've been to Lexington (base for the State University) a couple of times and it does seem to have a large number of little old ladies with blue-rinse hair who wear voluminous dresses and trainers. They are quite nice - I was asked to present a major prize at the Junior League Horse Show just because I was English - but I suspect their narrow faces reflect the fact that they have minds as narrow as a chopping axe.
How UK's radio station banned, and unbanned, Keillor (UK here is University of Kentucky)
By O. Leonard Press and Al Smith
Special to The Courier-Journal
Fans of Garrison Keillor are relieved to know that "The Writer's Almanac," the famed humorist's weekday five-minute radio show that they learned Friday morning was banned from the Bluegrass -- Central Kentucky, that is -- was unbanned Friday afternoon.
An outpouring of protests from Keillor's Kentucky fans apparently saved the show, the same day that the killing of it for too strong language was reported on the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The poems Keillor has been reading have featured language that is just too offensive to risk being fined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said Tom Godell, general manager of WUKY, the public broadcasting station operated by the University of Kentucky, earlier in the week..
"I don't question the artistic content," Godell told a reporter for the Herald-Leader, in explaining why he dropped the program Aug. 1, "but I have to question the language. It's not that he is behaving like Howard Stern, but the FCC has been so inconsistent."
And then, in what seemed to be one of the historic cave-ins of the principle of free speech and academic independence at the commonwealth's "flagship" school, which aspires to be a top 20 university, Godell added: "We don't know where we stand. We could no longer risk a fine."
Then the protests started.
Some digging by the Lexington reporter Jamie Gumbrecht turned up two poems Keillor had read that mentioned the word "breast" and another that had the phrase "get high."
Although Godell at first told the reporter that reaction to the cancellation had been minimal, apparently he hadn't begun to get the angry calls or yet read the buzz of internet correspondence and commentary we were reading, which mocked a university "in free fall" over "breast" as in breast cancer, over "get high" as a metaphor for joy, and suggested, darkly, that the ban was the act of a manager with a conservative ideology determined to silence a critic of President Bush.
On Friday afternoon in a statement put out through UK's public relations office, Godell said that in response to "many of our listeners" he was restoring the "Almanac" to a new schedule -- at 7:01 p.m. as part of National Public Radio's Fresh Air program. At the same time, he cautioned, "The concerns we have are real about the use of language that the FCC has fined stations for recently. . . . We have put in place an editing process . . . to delete such language. . . . "
Godell, whose station still carries Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" on weekends, might have noted that the FCC has added a woman described as "an anti-indecency activist." Critics charge she is there to give the religious right a voice at the FCC. By why WUKY's action against Keillor, who sings old-time hymns on the radio?
It is hard to believe that the FCC, which tolerates the language on "Law and Order-Special Victims Unit" and the scripts for "Desperate Housewives," would pull the plug on Garrison Keillor reading "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and the "breast of the new fallen snow." But Keillor himself, queried about WUKY's ban of his poetry readings, asked, "Should it become a shoulder or an elbow? I don't think so."
Godell may now have discovered that playing it safe is the most unsafe thing an educational station manager can do. He is terribly out of touch with the public-radio mainstream, and insensitive to the university community it serves if he believes that all he has to do is hit the delete key -- and all potential problems will disappear.
O.L. Press is the founding director of Kentucky Educational Television. Al Smith hosts KET's Comment on Kentucky. They live in Lexington.
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