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For the Australian television series, see Shock Jock.

A shock jock is a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disk jockey) who attracts attention using humor that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive. The term is usually used pejoratively to describe evocative or irreverent broadcasters whose manners and on air behavior is offensive to the listener.

Background

The idea of a performer or entertainer that breaks taboos or places their careers in the realm of the currently offensive is not a new one. Despite insistences of some decency activists, there are few eras of history in which there have not existed notoriously offensive performers (Benny Bell, Le Pétomane, Redd Foxx and Lenny Bruce for example). Shock jocks, as the current incarnation of this phenomenon, entered the American radio scene during the 1970s, and are still common into the 2000s.

Shock jocks may be informally identified by a number of common behaviors or conditions. Many such broadcasters revel in the fact (or belief) that a good portion of their listening audience consists of people who strongly dislike them; which of course, is an ironic but welcome boost to the broadcaster's ratings.

Shock jocks also tend to push the envelope of decency in their market, and generally show a lack of regard for communications regulations (e.g. FCC rules) regarding content. It is not at all uncommon for a shock jock to find him/herself fined by regulators for "going too far"; in fact, some broadcasters consider such an incident as a badge of honor. Also, such incidents are typically followed by a media circus, which of course provides more promotion for the broadcaster and brings more attention to their antics.

Popular envelope-pushing topics for shock jocks include sex, especially kinky and/or scatalogical topics (toilet humour), or just unabashed innuendo. Dialogue approaching or committing thinly veiled or excused racism, homophobia, exploitation of women, ridicule of the disabled, etc., are also tools of the shock trade. One increasingly common theme of shock jocks is to promote weekly highway "flashing" days, with names such as "Whip'em Out Wednesday (W.O.W for short)", where women are encouraged to expose themselves to other motorists. The Liz Wilde Show features "Blow It Out Yer Ass" Fridays, where nudity and sexual content dominates the broadcast.

Many shock jocks have been fired as a result of such punishments as regulatory fines, loss of advertisers, or simply social and political outrage. On the other hand, it is also not uncommon for such broadcasters to be quickly re-hired by another station or network.

Shock jocks in the U.S. are under greater pressure since the introduction of a new law in March 2004 which increased the fines on radio stations for violating decency guidelines by a factor of nearly 20.

Famous incidents

Some major popularized incidents involving shock jocks:

  • Mancow caused controversy on December 6, 2005 when he went on a rant on the Fox News morning show Fox and Friends attacking Howard Dean as a "vile" "bloodthirsty" and "evil" and called for him to be "tried for treason" for comments he made days earlier in regards to the Iraq War.[1]
  • May 12, 2004: Marconi and Tiny, two Portland, Oregon disk jockeys, played the audio portion of the video of Nick Berg's murder on their morning program several times, accompanied by music, jokes, and laughter over the scenes. The pair were fired the same day.
  • April 8, 2004: Howard Stern's show was dropped by Clear Channel Communications the few stations of theirs that had carried the show after they were fined $495,000 USD for a variety of individual statements made in a single Stern show. Stern used his remaining market share to criticize Clear Channel and the Bush Administration. He later left the public airwaves to move to satellite radio, which is not subject to the same FCC decency regulations.
  • January, 2004: Clear Channel is fined $715,000 USD for an airing of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge, which included (among other things) a scene involving explicit sexual conversations between children's cartoon characters. Bubba is fired shortly thereafter.
  • December 12, 2002: Porn actress Mary Carey submits to an IQ test on the Howard Stern show. Mary flunks, and is forced to clean Howard's toilet bowl with her hair.
  • August, 2002: Opie and Anthony sponsored a contest where the goal was to have sex in notable public places. After a couple was willing to have sex in a vestibule at St. Patrick's Cathedral, the resulting controversy led to Infinity Broadcasting cancelling the Opie and Anthony Show
  • February 27, 2001: Bubba the Love Sponge has a pig castrated and killed on-air. Bubba is charged with animal cruelty, but acquitted.
  • April 1995: On the Don Imus radio show, U.S. Senator Al D'Amato puts on a comical Asian accent and criticizes judge Lance Ito for personal interest in allowing television cameras in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Imus is criticized for keeping D'Amato on air because of the shock value of the senator's comments.
  • October 1993: Mancow made national headlines while working for radio station KYLD-FM in San Francisco, California. At the time, a story had been circulated that President Clinton had tied up traffic on an LAX runway for over an hour because of a haircut on Air Force One. Mancow staged a parody of this incident on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge during rush hour. He used vans to block the westbound lanes of the bridge while his sidekick, Jesus "Chuy" Gomez, got a haircut.
  • July 12, 1979: WLUP Chicago disc jockeys Steve Dahl and Garry Meier stage "Disco Demolition Night" at Comiskey Park between games of a scheduled Chicago White Sox-Detroit Tigers doubleheader. Fans were granted admittance to the games for 98 cents if they also donated unwanted disco records to be blown up at Comiskey's second base during the event. After the records were blown up, fans spilled onto the playing field and rioted, causing the White Sox to forfeit the scheduled second game.
  • February 1974: Larry Lujack of WCFL Chicago responds to a fan's letter on-air by stating he'll play more Jim Croce records "when [Croce] goes back into the studio and makes some more." (Croce had died in a Louisiana plane crash five months earlier.) The resulting protests from Croce fans led to an on-air admission by Lujack a few days later that the statement was inappropriate.

Noted shock jocks

Evocative or outspoken broadcasters have been branded with the "shock jock" label across all ends of the spectrum of radio (and TV) broadcasters. Most range from the sexually indecent to the politically offensive. Some broadcasters variously identified as "shock jocks" include:

United States

United Kingdom

Other countries

See also

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