Colby security officer stops DJ after complaint

WATERVILLE — A Colby College security officer acted properly when he shut down the campus radio station for 15 minutes following a complaint that it had aired vulgar language, the station manager said Wednesday.

“The DJ was not removed because of his musical selections being played. He was removed because of his on-air etiquette,” said Bruce Fowler, manager of WMHB-FM, a 110-watt station whose signal is carried within a 35-mile radius of Waterville.

Colby spokeswoman Mary Ellen Matava said WMHB is a community-operated station during the summer while classes are not in session.

“The board of directors of Mayflower Hill Broadcasting Corp. has instructed our security officers to remove a DJ from the air if they are using profanity or violating the ethical code they have agreed to follow,” she said.

Disc jockey Derrick Corson, a 16-year-old student at Winslow High School, told the Central Maine Morning Sentinel that the security officer entered the WMHB studios shortly before 5 a.m. Tuesday and “pulled (him) off the air” for broadcasting punk rock lyrics.

The security officer was acting on a phone complaint from a female listener in Palermo, relayed through Maine State Police headquarters in Augusta, the newspaper said.

Corson said the security officer walked into the studio and ordered him to “stop whatever you’re playing. Take it off and get off the air and out of the station.”

At the time, Corson was reading over the air lyrics from “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption,” by Jello Biafra, a song recorded by the rock group Dead Kennedys.

At about 4:50 a.m., Corson announced that “due to circumstances beyond our control we must leave the air.”

For the next 15 minutes, the station was “dead air,” he said.

Fowler said Corson broke station rules by broadcasting vulgar language and asking listeners to dial a telephone number that was the emergency line of a local ambulance service.