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Texas radio station bans Madonna over White House comments

By | Published on Wednesday 25 January 2017

Madonna

A Texas radio station has banned Madonna from its airwaves following her controversial comments at Washington, DC’s Women’s March on Saturday. Hits 105 in Texarkana is also urging other stations to follow suit, lest they be infected with a distrust of new president Donald Trump.

As previously reported, Madonna said in her speech that she had thought “an awful lot about blowing up the White House” but that actions such as that would not bring about positive change. Controversy kicked off around the comment – partly due to several TV stations cutting to elsewhere upon her mention of blowing up the White House – but the singer later said that her comments had been “taken wildly out of context”.

“I spoke in metaphor and I shared two ways of looking at things”, she wrote in a statement posted on Instagram. Meanwhile, Republican Newt Gingrich was calling for her to be arrested, accusing her of being part of “an emerging left-wing fascism” in an interview with Fox News. He also said that her statement after the speech was an attempt to save herself, as “she now understands she’s at risk”.

Now, in a move that is definitely not capitalising on all this in a bid to boost listener figures for the relatively new station, Hits 105 in Texakarna has banned the “un-American” Madonna from its local programming “indefinitely”.

“Banning all Madonna songs at Hits 105 is not a matter of politics, it’s a matter of patriotism”, said the station’s General Manager Terry Thomas (not that one) in a statement. “It just feels wrong to us to be playing Madonna songs and paying her royalties when the artist has shown un-American sentiments. If all stations playing Madonna took their lead from us, that would send a powerful economic message to Madonna”.

As we all know, US radio doesn’t actually hand over very much by the way of royalties to the music community – not paying any royalties at all to artists and labels, and just a little to songwriters and publishers – so I’m not sure quite how powerful that message would be. It’s also not entirely clear how much of Madonna’s music the station was playing in the first place either.



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