Where the Censors Are Strong, the Good Looking Women Are Covered Up, and the Above Average Children Kept Away From Poetry

Julian Sanchez | August 12, 2005

Via Romenesko comes this story about a Kentucky radio station that felt, in this age of an obscenity-obsessed FCC, it had to pull a potentially offensive radio program. The program? Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. The problem? Well, you can read the offending three poems and see for yourself (or go to the Writers Almanac site and hear Keillor reading them if you poke through the archives). About as anodyne a set of poems as you could dig up without stooping to Kilmer. The station manager was doubtless overreacting—it's hard to imagine even the touchiest listener complaining about this stuff—but is this really what we've come to?