One of America’s great iconoclasts over these last decades has been Howard Stern. He made his mark on talk radio like none other, courageously beholden to no force able to rein him in. No boss, no station, no media conglomerate, no government watchdog was ever able to curb his free-wheeling opinions, given unrestrainedly by the self-styled “King of All Media,” even though many powerful entities certainly tried. Fired by WNBC in New York, he went on to even bigger and better things, all the while fending off millions of dollars in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indecency fines levied against his broadcast licensees such as Infinity Broadcasting and Clear Channel. Stern never backed down though and wound up doing things his way in the end. His venue is now on Sirius XM and still ranked the 9th most popular radio program in the USA.

When I went on his show three times at its height in the late 1990’s it was ranked #1, with perhaps twenty million listeners in sixty markets from coast to coast. In those days Mr. Stern was a one-man howling hurricane, a temblor on the air. He expressed any opinion, took on all comers, aired and explored a hundred hot-button topics that none other would touch, and deservedly etched his name into Americana. I, for example, on his air on January 20, 1998,........

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