An oldies country music radio station serving a rural Arizona area that aired a public service announcement for two years telling people how to hide potential evidence in child pornography cases has stopped doing so after advertisers received threats.
 
KAVV-FM owner Paul Lotsof said in an interview that he does not like child pornography but created the announcement because he thinks Arizona’s 10-year minimum sentence for each image of child porn is too harsh and costly for taxpayers.
 
He explained: “Nobody put me up to it, and nobody paid. My feeling is that these people don’t deserve life in prison just because they have pictures of naked juveniles.”
 
But, he said, recent public comment about the announcement was “99.9 percent” negative and some radio station advertisers received threats. The signal of the radio station from the small southeastern Arizona city of Benson beams across a wide area that stretches toward the Mexico border.
 
The announcement described Arizona’s tough penalties for possession of child pornography and then provided advice on how to avoid convictions.
 
It said: “If you have such material, 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.”
 
The announcement drew the attention of local law enforcement officials, with Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels calling it “disgusting and unacceptable” and encouraging “evil behavior.”
 
U.S. radio stations are required to air public service announcements in the interest of community service. There are no requirements or restrictions on the announcements’ content.
 
The ad ran for two years before a news reporter in Tucson broke the story.