Even when parents try to protect their children, they can't do so 24 hours a day. What happens when the kids are at school or playing at friends' houses? What happens when they're in the back seat of the family station wagon stopped at a red light and the guy in the next car is blaring Fifty Cent or the Greaseman?
Children are bombarded on a daily basis by disturbing and overtly sexualized images in omnipresent advertising. You can't watch the evening news without advertisements for erectile dysfunction, or walk into a mall without lewd images from Victoria's Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch leaping out at you from every turn.
Last week, Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio network, suspended Howard Stern's show just in time for its CEO to testify before Congress about the company's new zero tolerance policy on indecency. Perhaps these companies are finally getting the message.
Sure there's an audience for trash -- and if adults want to buy this smut, the Supreme Court has ruled they have that right. But why not force those who want to buy obscene and indecent products to be the ones inconvenienced rather than the rest of us? With all the various methods of delivering images and sounds, why use the public airwaves to present the likes of Howard Stern? You've always been able to buy pornography, only it used to be sold under the counter and in brown wrapping paper, it didn't come into your home uninvited.
Maybe if we put the onus on those who want this garbage by insisting it be available only through direct purchase and not on the public airwaves, it would be safe again to give a child a simple radio.