SHOCK VALUES

In New York, Howard Stern asks a stripper to unveil her new implants so that he can describe them to his listeners.

In Chicago, Mancow Muller discusses naughty sexual practices with a sidekick.

And in Los Angeles, Tom Leykis urges female listeners to flash motorists on the freeway, while he muses on his favorite types of “boobage.”

Scandalous attacks on America’s high moral character? Not really.

Punishable offenses that could generate millions of dollars in federal fines? Quite possibly.

The almost-anything-goes world of shock-jock radio has turned upside down since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show.

Since that fleeting glimpse of Jackson’s mostly obscured anatomy, the Federal Communications Commission has issued more than $1.5 million in fines to broadcast companies airing Stern, Muller and Bubba the Love Sponge (aka Tom Clem).

And the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill allowing fines of $500,000 for each instance of radio “indecency,” with the White House voicing support and the U.S. Senate considering even more draconian measures.

Yet for all the federal muscle-flexing and media hubbub, the broadcasts themselves hardly have changed at all. Last week, Stern waxed poetic about public defecation in Las Vegas, a Muller sidekick riffed briefly on NBA star Kobe Bryant’s rape charge and, somehow, the world stayed on its axis.

Observers on both sides of the free speech debate agree that the recent controversies hardly have made a dent on what we hear on the radio, unless you happen to live in one of the six midsize markets from which Stern was recently dropped by Clear Channel Communications. (The show has never been carried in Spokane.)

Both sides, however, fear what’s coming.

“If the FCC succeeds in silencing Howard Stern, it could be radio’s death knell,” says Bruce DuMont, founder and president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago and host of “Beyond the Beltway,” a nationally syndicated political talk show.

Counters Bill Johnson, president of the Michigan-based American Decency Organization: “The radio industry is circling its wagons, the momentum for change is slowing down. Our culture is headed downward.”

After roughly two decades of minimal FCC action on radio indecency, the agency in the past several months seems to have gone on steroids. It has levied individual fines as high as $755,000 against San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications for radio skits in which Bubba the Love Sponge mocked Scooby-Doo, George Jetson and Alvin the Chipmunk in absurdly sexual terms.

Clear Channel subsequently fired both Bubba and Stern, the latter after the company received a $495,000 FCC fine for earlier Stern broadcasts, including a discussion of a certain sex act that was accompanied by the pre-recorded sounds of flatulence.

So why has this suddenly become a federal case?

Beyond the obvious trigger of l’affaire Jackson — which only intensified an FCC fining binge that had begun a few months earlier — an argument can be made that some public resentment has been building as American broadcast media exploded during the late 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.

The rapid proliferation of FM stations, with the FCC creating spots on the dial for hundreds of new outlets in the 1980s, arguably ushered in the age of the “shock jock.” Typically a twentysomething white male who tried to stand out from the pack, early practitioners such as Steve Dahl in Chicago and Stern in various markets offered lusty discussions of sex, race, toilet habits, musical tastes and anything else that might attract and provoke an audience.

Before Stern hit the big time in New York, in the 1980s, he was refining his adolescent-based humor at radio stations from Detroit to Washington, D.C. His antics got him fired, hired, fined and, eventually, propelled him to the status of ringmaster of a syndicated, Manhattan-based show now heard on 35 stations nationwide and rebroadcast — in part — on the E! Entertainment Television network.

Though most Stern imitators have quickly died in the ratings, a few who have followed in his wake — such as Muller and Leykis — similarly have built national audiences offering gleefully rude, crude, lewd programs aimed at the free-spending, young-adult male audience that advertisers covet.

Even before Jackson’s semi-naked dance, conservative activists were trying to drum up support to get Stern and colleagues booted off the air, to little avail. They found a receptive ear, however, in the Bush administration’s FCC.

“The FCC hadn’t been doing its job, in my opinion,” says David Edward Smith, who has been relentless in filing FCC complaints against Muller, prompting Muller to file a harassment suit against him in March. “And now they’re finally starting to do their job.”

But even if it were possible to define, to everyone’s satisfaction, the meaning of indecency, constitutional scholars argue that the FCC has a limited legal basis for controlling speech.

“We have a very expansive constitutional protection of free speech, and even on the airwaves, the FCC’s power is sharply limited,” says University of Chicago professor Cass R. Sunstein, a noted expert on First Amendment issues.

“Basically, what’s going on here involves speech that is constitutionally protected. Not all of it, but there’s a lot of room to say offensive things on the airwaves.”

And with the FCC retroactively deeming some broadcasts indecent, then levying staggering fines, broadcasters literally have no idea when they’re crossing a line into forbidden territory.

“Basically, the FCC is saying, ‘We’re not going to tell you what’s dirty, but if it is dirty, we’re going to bash your skull in,’ ” says Muller, whose show on WKQX-FM has drawn $42,000 in FCC fines.

“We’re easy targets. Label somebody a ‘shock jock,’ and who’s going to stick up for them? Call it porn, and who’s going to stick up for it? You’ll notice the FCC is not attacking hip-hop stations where practically every song is X-rated.”

The selective enforcement of vaguely defined rules helps explain why Stern has vowed to quit his show if the aforementioned House legislation becomes law. He has mused aloud about taking his bevy of strippers, porn stars and flatulence performers to the fledgling satellite radio industry — which, like cable TV, is heard only by subscribers and, so far, at least, operates outside FCC content control.

To those who have been around for a while, it’s all a sad reminder of past culture wars.

“It’s really part of the same phenomenon I experienced,” says John Frohnmeyer, who was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the debates of the late 1980s and ‘90s over NEA grants for controversial work by artists Karen Finley, Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.

“But for free speech to really work in any society, you have to have the courage to hear views that are contrary to your own.”