A rural Arizona oldies country music station has found themselves in the spotlight after making the curious decision to air a pretty damned unorthodox public service announcement over the past two years. The PSA, which was recently pulled amidst threats against the station's advertisers, told listeners to hide any potential evidence they may have in child porn cases.
A local sheriff in southeastern Arizona's Cochise County says that he has begun an investigation seeking legal advice from the county attorney over whether they can file charges in connection with the announcement, but that appears highly unlikely (more on that at the bottom of the page).
The station's owner, Paul Lotsof, was interviewed about the PSA's content. He said that he's not a child porn advocate, but that he thinks the state's 10-year minimum sentence for each image is too harsh and costly for taxpayers.
"Nobody put me up to it, and nobody paid," Lotsof said. "My feeling is that these people don't deserve life in prison just because they have pictures of naked juveniles." However, he says that the public's recent reaction has been almost unanimously negative, and that the station's other sponsors have received threats for their extremely tenuous link to the announcement.
Cochise County sheriff Mark Dannels, as we mentioned, wanted to check into the possibility of bringing up criminal charges. Daniels said that Lotsof is "enticing people and providing the information that says, 'Hey, if you're going to look at child porn, this is what you need to do so the cop doesn't catch you.' ... Freedom of speech does not include telling people to commit crimes."
However, the county attorney disagrees, and says that the PSA was protected by the First Amendment. Additionally, the FCC has received a few complaints about the announcement but appears unlikely to act, because, as spokeswoman Janice Wise said, "It's up to the station to determine their [community's] public interest."
According to CBS News, the announcement said: "If you have such material [child porn], you can save yourselves and your family a ton of grief and save the taxpayers a lot of money by never storing such pictures on the hard drive of your computer. Always use an external drive and hide it where nobody will ever find it. Likewise, never keep paper pictures, tapes or films of naked juveniles where anybody else can find them."
Kind of surprising that took two years to make headlines.
