Howard Stern Scoops Still Fluster MSM

LA Times columnist tries to have it both ways: shaming a radio legend for not being afraid of talking about sex, while encouraging parents to… talk about sex.

Billie Eilish has been appearing as a guest on the Howard Stern show since she was 17 years old. She clearly enjoys his style. And it’s one of many reasons she opens up to him far more than the rest of the press. And… she’s not alone.

Totally disappointed with the latest Robin Abcarian piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, and especially in the fact that her editors didn’t seem to want to edit it.

Let’s start with this gem: “As always with Stern, talk turned to sex. And then to pornography.”

Like many traditional journalists, it would just kill Ms. Abcarian to admit Howard is an excellent interviewer and that is part of the reason he has had the most successful run in radio history.

One of his breakthroughs is his interviews are epic in runtime and subject matter.

Billie and her brother spoke with Stern for an hour and 45 minutes. Even casual fans of his know he is obsessed with SNL. So at an hour and 5 minutes into the convo he gushed over the second song she performed a few days previous on SNL and asked, “I think it’s about porn.”

“There is a verse about porn,” she said after giggling. “It’s called ‘Male Fantasy.’”

She then spent 15 minutes talking about the song and how incredibly violent porn at 11 traumatised her and fascinated her to the point where she had problems once she became sexually active.

Howard agreed that if he had access to extreme, hardcore XXX at a young age it would have done the same to him.

Stern with Billie and Finneas in 2019. During the pandemic Howard has done his shows remotely with the guests either calling in from their homes or they go to the Sirius studio and talk into the cameras.

Nowhere in Robin’s piece is the camaraderie the Billie and Finneas have with Howard, how open they have been with him over the years, and how his format led to this revelation that any number of journalists could have gleaned from a song the pair were clearly spotlighting.

And yet it was Stern’s scoop.

Instead of praising the King of All Media for providing a safe space for all of his big guests, Robin (and her editors) seemingly felt the typical clichéd urge to demean and misrepresent him.

Talk about killing the messenger.

The irony is when Billie told her shocked mom years ago that she had been watching BDSM at such a young age, Billie asked, “how else was I supposed to learn about sex?”

Certainly not from judgemental opinion writers. And for sure not from the uptight pages of local newspapers.

It would be truly shocking to read an article in a prestigious paper like the Los Angeles Times praising Stern for being a radio trailblazer in treating LGBTQ people as equals, something he has done since the 1980s —

or for, OMG, normalizing conversations about sex on the radio. A hill he was fined on several times and famously harangued by the FCC.

Another scoop Stern had in his Elish interview was the singer contracted COVID.

Billie Eilish didn’t open up about watching porn at 11 because Howard Stern conversations lead to sex, “as always.” She opened up because Stern is a world class interviewer who asked a relevant question about a tune she sang days ago on national TV.

(It’s ok to write that.)

We live in modern times. And one of the nice things about these times is you can delete an offensive, ridiculous, inappropriate graf from the web version of the piece.

I hope Robin and/or her editors do that faster than you can say Baba Booey.

Update: