BlogWood: MT Archives

Banned in Tampa: The Times weighs in

Sp Times:

A DJ with a pre-dawn show on community radio station WMNF has been pulled off the air for playing profanity during his broadcast.

Norwood Orrick said he thought the songs had indecent words in their titles, but not in their lyrics. A "slip up" caused the playing of one song that contained the "f" word.

Orrick, like a majority of WMNF-FM programmers, is a volunteer. He called his suspension, which is open-ended, "overly harsh."

He said he was merely mocking the Federal Communications Commission during his weekly 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. program. But station managers assert he was willfully testing the FCC.

"I find it ironic, to say the least, that WMNF, which presents itself as something of a bastion of free speech, would be so quick to suspend a programmer - hours after the show in question - based on a single alleged incident which, obviously, no one has even bothered to confirm," Orrick said.