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Profiles in Ass Covering

Eliza TruittPosted Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001, at 7:25 PM ET

Last night when Chatterbox spoke with Jack Evans, a regional senior vice president of programming at the radio station chain Clear Channel Communications, he acknowledged that his company had distributed to its programmers a list of songs with questionable lyrics that stations should avoid in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack. (Click here for his original statements on the list, and scroll down for the content of the list itself.)

Today, however, Clear Channel issued a press release denying the existence of the list, and the Web site of Radio Ink, a radio industry trade publication, reported, "Clear Channel confirmed to Radio Ink this morning that the banned list was only an Internet rumor."

So what's the truth here? Clear Channel admits it distributed a list of songs to program directors. It obviously wasn't encouraging stations to play songs like "Another One Bites the Dust." If you read the press release carefully, it appears Clear Channel is weaseling out of sticky situation: "Clear Channel Radio has not banned any songs from any of its radio stations." Right. They didn't ban any songs, they simply asked that stations not play them. Chatterbox wonders if there's another song they might want to add to this supposedly nonexistent list: a little something by the Sex Pistols.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Eliza Truitt, a former editor at Slate, now works as a wedding photographer in Seattle.
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