If you know me, I've probably mentioned that Opie & Anthony were suspended from XM radio last month. A homeless man, "Homeless Charlie", was on the show and while trying (and succeeding) to be funny he said "Who's that George Bush bitch? Rice? Condoleezza Rice? I'd love to fuck that bitch there. She needs a man." "Punch her all in the fuckin' face. Shut up bitch." as Anthony described what a horrified look she'd have on her face. It might sound awful out of context, but if you're a listener of the show you know its just a bunch of guys sitting around trying to make each other, and their audience, laugh.

The station they are on, XM 202 The Virus is a XL channel, which labels it a channel that is uncensored, and known to have very graphic language. Still, someone complained. Not a listener. XM reacted to the complaints by suspending them for 30 days. In radio, suspended translates to "fired very soon".

Since it was not the listeners who enjoy the show that had a problem they took it upon themselves to fight XM and give them more shit for suspending them than they would have gotten from the special interest group. According to XM spokesman Chance Patterson, about 5,000 people canceled their subscription due to the suspension. The fans made it onto CNN to talk about why the suspension didn't make sense, and the fans even smashed their XM radios in protest. Many even attacked the XM/Sirius merger.

It worked. Friday O&A were back on the air. They were welcomed by hundreds of listeners chanting their names as Opie and Anthony thanked them for all they did.

Anyway, welcome back O&A. I missed the uncensored part of the show a lot and I'm glad we aren't going to repeating the 2002 incident, at least not right away.

P.S. You can listen to the audio here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under Opie & Anthony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.