Why I'm Keeping My Sirius-XM Subscription

Thoughts, notions & knee jerk responses on the boycott SXM issue and yes, Steve Bannon's an ass:

There are now, and have been for years, more than a few Fox stations broadcasting on the platform, plus the Patriot channel among others whereon much partisan and bigoted gasconade blows chronically, harshly and steadily. It’s my opinion that many of these “broadcasters" suck at the job. Their style is hackneyed, their elocutionary skills negligible to nonexistent and their efforts to compel are pedestrian, at best.

I am a professional musician, songwriter and artist, have been for nearly as long as I can remember. I’ve performed at Sirius/XM, and my own recordings as well as those upon which I’ve contributed are regularly played on various channels, a few of which are adroitly hosted  with the talents of some my oldest and dearest friends.

I’m somewhat regularly surprised when other fellow artists seem unaware of the existence of some relatively rarified informational/ talk / debate/ conversation/ interview show programming on SXM channels such as POTUS, Insight, PRX etc. Many times and to many bright folks have I enthusiastically explained that after being a faithful and enthusiastic denizen within the comparatively meager listenership of those shows that if they were indeed made available in the “mainstream” media that our country would have already taken a few more evolved, erudite and enlightened turns away from the situational chaotic mess we’re in now.

I was in fact out for my afternoon run on a tour stop in Iowa City this past Summer, when I heard Llewelyn King (whose show, White House Chronicle is albeit a weekly PBS/NPR mainstay, but whom is a regular guest on Stand-Up w Pete Dominick (Insight), Morning Briefing w Tim Farley, and The Press Pool w Julie Mason etc.) as he was assessing insightfully how a White House should NOT be run state: “This is chaotic without historic precedence, and NO GOOD has EVER come from chaos.” I had to pull up my gait and ponder that pensively.

I’ve been a subscriber to XM and Sirius/XM for over 10 years now and I must unabashedly state that my awareness, my social and political scholarship, and political views have been informed, formed and made more than ever robust via more than a dozen truly enriching, elucidating and opinion fortifying (and dispelling) articles, authors, journalists to who I’ve become aware through these AMAZING shows and their programming. 

The number of authors, journalists, pundits, specialized and dedicated EXPERTS (yes, remember them?), provocateurs, satirists, inflective agents from qualified and compelling quarters are far too many to mention here if I were to try to lay out a litany of pathfinding champions that have no better nor more accommodating formats in the post Suskind, Pine, Cavett, King (and now Charlie Rose) age of interview shows. Stephen Kinzer, Matt Taibbi, Eric Segall, Aaron Carroll, Chris Frates, Jennifer Bendry (actually, the Weekly Round Table on Julie Mason’s Press Pool show on POTUS has more unfettered and factually formed opinions than ALL the network Sunday shows combined). Anyone who would like a direct line to the worlds and wile-wary ways of straight up honest to goodness investigative journals need only prevail upon the Twitter feeds of the hundreds of adroit and arcanely savvy and skilled minds heard on the multitude of these impartially dispassionate shows.

I thought it was a joke when I tuned in two mornings ago to hear callers say, on the seminal StandUp! with Pete Dominick show, that they were unsubscribing due to Sirius XM’s gift of a platform to this “monster”. The reason was that they “had to stand for something” and that this was the only way in which they could have their “voice heard”. Again, this was on a show called Stand Up! and they were voicing their opinion on live radio. Oh, well anyway…

...I agree that Bannon's an asshole, but he most certainly isn’t alone. I can tune him out—and usually should and do. BUT, if I were to want to tune in to inform myself of the particular tack and spin being employed by him to his dim minions on any given day (ever read Don’t Think Of An Elephant by George Lakoff?), I would be able to call and challenge he and them directly, or at least do it live and in real time.


Over 16 years ago, when XM & Sirius were slowly birthed as the Gemini twins of the new satellite broadcast technology whose eventual demise was speculated and trumpeted by forecasters and detractors  (XM Satellite Radio's first broadcast was on September 25, 2001, nearly four months before Sirius) there remained terrestrial radio and a slowly emerging 'new-normal’ which we now know as media streaming.

12 years later in 2013, the survival of the companies relied on their merging, and since then Sirius/XM has slowly come literally out of the blue, out of the red and into the great black as a cash juggernaut of an established economic model with 30.1 Million subscribers.

During its touch and go years, though before the merger, both companies were hemorrhaging dollars,. After the merger, one life-saver was the acquisition of Howard Stern’s show. It had already garnered solid millions of faithful listeners. It’s been arguably claimed that Howard and his show which many consider jarringly sexist and otherwise offensive to many, was indeed was one of a few stalwart assets that kept it all going during those formative subscriber-base building fiscal years.

There was one 6-month period of my life when I listened to terrestrially broadcast Howard Stern show (and was sporadically entertained by it). After one or more profoundly offensive allusions therein, I made a point not to continue listening. I see that his show is still carried on SXM, just as Fox carries Sean Hannity and Co. (not to mention White House Briefings) and well, I feel this is not a zero sum gain.

I could reiterate the obvious, stomp my feat and say no, no, no to anyone who is participating in any way in the accommodation or propping up of a truly evil person, but since we’ve been seemingly waltzing at times blindly with the devil himself in so many broader realms in myriad fashions, I choose to stoke up on as much compassion-based knowledge and implementable insight that I proudly receive, ingest, digest and make manifest with my own tools of persuasion therein to make small differences in my daily sentient life and creative art. I choose to stay engaged, informed, enticed, interested and eager to learn and be proven wrong from time to time while arming myself with fact-based insight and germane data with which to debate folks who’ve proudly imbibed and are eagerly regurgitating their various flavors of homophilic Kool-Aid.

I’m keeping my subscription to Sirius-XM. It’s worth every penny. Plus, they pay broadcast performance royalties, which is more than I can say of terrestrial radio. What a country. I do love it, though.






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