Tom Leykis, I haven't heard that name in ages. I heard he retired a few years back. I had a rather interesting conversation saying that Leykis was one of the grandfathers of the manosphere movement who was saying a lot of the stuff we hear today way back in the 90s and early 2000s. He hated Seattle after his show got moved when The Wolf signed on and they moved him to nights on KISW where his show was heavily edited due to the PD or GM scared as hell and really locking down the content. I swear someone was sitting in the booth listening and then constantly hitting the dump button if he mentioned sexual references or mentions of body parts.
They had to. Nipplegate hit like a bomb on the radio industry (even though Nipplegate was on TV.)
Personally, I think it was a convenient excuse for the FCC to crack down on music radio stations that played uncensored album versions (it was more common than you'd think) or evening/overnight hosts that casually let an f-bomb or s-bomb fly (not uncommon in the late 1990s/early 2000s either.)
The "Guy Talk" format was also in the crosshairs. I'm sure in some socially conservative areas, people complained to the FCC about Leykis's "Flash Friday". Or those songs with cuss words. Or that overnight girl who's sassier than her aircheck demo indicated. They just compounded the cases into one huge crack down, making Janet Jackson that target of everybody's ire when it was really MTV Networks responsible for that particular mess.
The radio wasn't trying to deliberately be rude, but sound more relatable to their audience. People casually drop expletives in their speech all the time. It's wasn't any new thing. It existed as long as I can remember.
But suddenly, stations were calling their lawyers because that Sunday morning public service program about prostate or cervical cancer, which was about as erotic as a tax form to everybody else except Michael Powell, could bankrupt them.
And we're still living under the Nipplegate rules. It's contributed it's own damaging effect in radio. It makes radio look prudish and behind the times. And it's hard to compete with unfiltered sources this way. It's furthering broadcast radio's decline.
Radio is a lousy babysitter. (Kid Star and Radio Disney tried, bless their hearts) But the reality is most kids aren't even listening to an old fashioned terrestrial radio. Why would you when you have a video game system, Netflix, cellphone, tablet and PC/Mac, etc.?
And finally,
how old are we again?
One may mope the loss of innocence. But they forget that particular stretch of the Rubicon had been crossed when the president used that language on national TV in everybody's face with his "s--thole countries" remark. That should have automatically and permanently invalidated the Nipplegate crackdown.