After 40-odd years as the self-styled "King of All Media", Howard Stern has once again embarked on that greatest of radio industry traditions, and gotten fired.
It didn't have to be that way.
I remember at my first big-market radio job, at a talk radio station in the Twin Cities back during Ronald Reagan's second term. The other producers and I spent our free time between production meetings and air time listening to cassette tapes of this "Howard Stern" guy from New York.
It was about 24 degrees past "edgy" for Fairness-Doctrine-era radio; the sort of stuff where our management would have dissected us and killed us, in that order, had we tried to do anything like it on the air.
Naturally, we loved it. We were its target audience - a bunch of guys in our early 20s. It poked at everyone, and no one - sort of like Johnny Carson, the king of late-night at the time, while poiking at nobody in particular. In short, it was entertaining.
And for a while there, Stern almost made himself a sympathetic character - his autobiography, Private Parts, along with the biopic based on it (a prestige project, directed by Betty Thomas, the hot flavor director at the time) portrayed him as a nebbishy family guy, fiercely loyal to his wife and kids, with a very off-kilter day job in a psychotic industry.
I was rooting for the guy.
Chasing the big payout, he went syndicated in the late '90s, and, perhaps dodging an FCC that was still very much in the enforcement business at the time, jumped to Sirius FM, the satellite radio provider, in 1995 for about $100 million/year, back when $100 million a year was pretty significant money. He was number one with a bullet (again, kids, with the asking your parents thing); he was, for a certain class of people (that, by my thirties, with three kids to raise, I was less and less) entertaining.
Twenty years passed. And then...:
Last year, Howard Stern said he "hated" anyone who voted for Donald Trump and demanded they stop listening to his Radio Show.
— Cillian (@CilComLFC) August 6, 2025
Today, it’s been announced that SiriusXM has CANCELED ‘The Howard Stern Show’ after his Ratings plummeted.
FAFO, Howard! 🔥🤣 pic.twitter.com/4eWqX05OSf
It's not entirely true; his $100 million/year contract is coming to an end, and Sirius is reportedly...well, not exactly firing him:
"Stern's contract is up in the fall and while Sirius is planning to make him an offer, they don't intend for him to take it," one insider said of the impending end to the shock jock's latest five-year contract.
"Sirius and Stern are never going to meet on the money he is going to want. It's no longer worth the investment."
He's not getting "canceled" or "fired". He's reportedly just going to be induced to quit.
So - was it the politics?
Or was he, like Colbert, just not funny anymore?
Once a swashbuckling, norms-shattering FCC antagonist, Stern has morphed into everything he formerly railed against.
When it comes to celebrities, he can’t fawn over them enough now. Stern’s a first-class, A-list “Ass Smoochio,” a nickname he gave Arsenio Hall back in the day.
Last summer, Stern — overestimating his own influence — made things even worse by entering the presidential media circus to sit down with a clearly diminished Joe Biden.
Was it the money? Was it the politics? Or that his audience reportedly plummeted from 20 million a day to 125,000?
Why choose?
For me, by the way, it was neither. While I never subscribed to Sirius, and live in one of the few radio markets where Stern's syndicated morning show got clobbered by a local morning show, Stern was still inescapable, which became less and less a good thing; the nadir, for me, was this episode:
Howard Stern humiliated Dana Plato on air by mocking her sobriety and letting callers viciously insult her. She died the next day. It was exploitation disguised as entertainment and remains deeply disturbing. pic.twitter.com/De727sKGkP
— 🇺🇸Lionel🇺🇸 (@LionelMedia) August 6, 2025
Not that there's not some synchronicity between that and his latter-day germophobic Covid-Karen Long Island liberal personal the guy whose interviews were infamously crass, obscene, and gratuitously cruel, turned in this performance on behalf of Joe Biden:
May, 2024. Howard Stern conducts one of the most shameful and cringiest interviews in the history of American media.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) August 6, 2025
As a barely functioning Biden sat there listening, Stern spent an hour spewing pure sycophantic propaganda. He recited all the fake stories that Biden has told… pic.twitter.com/soUUMurraP
There's no need to cry for the guy; he's taken those 20 years' worth of serious Sirius money and done pretty well for himself.
Stern was the ultimate "morning guy" in an industry where the idea of "morning radio", trying to shock people awake on their way to work, has become an anachronism. Like the institution of the "morning guy" itself, Stern peaked in the '80s and never quite got the mojo back.
