June 25, 2008
The Station That Dared to Defend Carlin’s ‘7 Words’ Looks Back

By GLENN COLLINS
As the encomiums for George Carlin have rolled in from stand-up legends, celebrities and scholars, his death at 71 has also been noted at a diminutive, iconic and iconoclastic radio station in Manhattan, WBAI-FM.

Its broadcast of the comedian’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” became a landmark moment in the history of free speech. In a 1978 milestone in the station’s contentious and unruly history, WBAI lost a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that to this day has defined the power of the government over broadcast material it calls indecent.

“It’s a bad time here for us because George Carlin was part of the family,” said Anthony Riddle, the station’s general manager. “I think all the producers are dealing with it in their own way,” Mr. Riddle said, some doing commentary and others running archival material, including a bleeped-out version of the “Seven Words” routine.

The 1978 ruling, often termed “the Carlin case,” was actually called Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, and turned on a 12-minute Carlin monologue called “Filthy Words” that appeared on a 1973 album, “Occupation: Foole.”

After the Carlin album monologue was broadcast on WBAI in 1973 during “Lunch Pail,” an afternoon show, a listener objected that his young son had heard the words on a car radio. The corporate parent of WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation, received a letter of reprimand from the commission, which the company challenged in court.

The Supreme Court said that the broadcast was indecent, though not obscene, and gave the commission the right to determine the definition of indecency and to prohibit such material from being broadcast during hours when children were likely to be listening.

Despite this legal Dunkirk, “the fact that his seven dirty words having emanated from here is kind of a source of pride,” said Jose R. Santiago, the station’s news director.

The court decision “was about more than just radio,” Mr. Riddle added, “it was about the right to be human beings in the United States.”

“It was a gutsy thing for a radio station to do, taking that stand,” he said.

Though the station was not fined, Pacifica paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, said Larry Josephson, the WBAI station manager from 1974 to 1976.

Now, broadcasting the seven words “would cost us $360,000 per incident — so those seven words would cost us $2.5 million,” about equal to the station’s annual budget, Mr. Riddle said. “Now we’d be severely limited in taking a chance on protecting people’s free-speech rights.”

Recently Mr. Josephson had to abide by the consequences of the very commission decision he was involved in, as the independent producer of WBAI’s annual “Bloomsday” celebration on June 16, which honored James Joyce and his novel “Ulysses.”

Though the broadcast began at 7 p.m., the protagonist Molly Bloom’s famous lengthy monologue of erotic musings — which contains several forbidden words — had to be read after 10 p.m. during the “safe harbor” period when the F.C.C. allows the broadcast of what it terms “indecent” material.

The station that for generations has spoken truth to power is incongruously situated on the 10th floor of 120 Wall Street, and smack in the middle of the FM dial, at 99.5. Now in its 48th year, WBAI was both an expression, and ringleader, of the counterculture during its peak in the mid-1960s through the Vietnam War.

Observers have said that in its heyday, its on-air personalities, like Mr. Josephson, Steve Post and Bob Fass, extended the popularity of FM radio and explored the possibilities of the medium.

But its turmoil-filled subsequent history has featured a fiesta of staff clashes, board eruptions, station coups and protests. Amid accusations of every imaginable form of -ism, on-air personalities and producers have been summarily banned; on-air resignations have not been unknown.

These days WBAI, whose slogan is “Your Peace and Justice Community Radio Station,” has a paid staff of 25 and 200 independent volunteer producers, Mr. Riddle said, adding that WBAI has more than 200,000 listeners. He declined to say how many subscribers there are, but the number is believed to be fewer than 20,000; the minimum subscription rate is $25 a year.

Mr. Riddle, who joined the station in February, said that “it’s always difficult to run a democracy,” adding that “a lot of people believe in the kind of radio we provide,” since the station does not accept advertising, underwriting or grants.

If in many ways the station has changed, the legality of broadcasting the “Seven Words” has not.

“Now, 35 years later, we can’t take a chance of playing it,” Mr. Riddle said. “Discussion of the words is not acceptable, unless you cut the heart out of it.”