"Clear Channel Radio never banned any songs after 9-11."

I hope you didn't miss that, buried as it was at the end of a post that I think a lot of readers blew off because it's about last night's "American Idol." That post has only 13 comments right now, and a couple of the later posts have over 100 comments. I know my readers have interests that only somewhat overlap with mine, and I realize the number of comments has an unknown relationship to the number of readers. But still, I have to worry that things I want read do not get read.

I wanted to make sure readers see this material, which corrects something I wrote in a post a week ago about the song "Walk Like an Egyptian": "It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks."  I'm reposting the correction because I want to get out this story of fake news that became fake history:

I got that from Wikipedia, where the information is presented like this:

"Walk Like an Egyptian" was one of the songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks^[9] and was also included in a "list of records to be avoided" drawn up by the BBC during the Gulf War.^{[10][11][clarification needed]}

I have an informant — a person I have strong reason to trust and who I believe has first-hand knowledge — who wrote to me:

This is a battle I no longer fight; it’s been lost. I even saw it mentioned in a recently published college textbook of American history. But for you, here’s the real story:

Clear Channel Radio never banned any songs after 9-11. A day or so after the attack, one program director in San Diego sent an e-mail to other PDs with a short list of songs they might want to think twice about for a short time, purely for reasons of taste and sensitivity. I doubt that Walk Like An Egyptian was on the list then.

Now, you have to recall the typical bad-boy snotty attitude of the typical FM rock program director of 2001. Immediately, for their own entertainment, many of them started adding to the list, coming up with increasingly ridiculous suggestions, and trading the list back and forth.

The later, ridiculous list is the one that that made its way to the press, to the early forms of social media, and eventually to history books. Clear Channel was already being bashed for its size and its destruction of local radio, so this story fit right in.