Radio host Howard Stern promised he isn’t going anywhere—at least for now—during a Wednesday episode of The Howard Stern Show, his first since a report claimed the longtime SiriusXM show may be cancelled.
Stern is traditionally on vacation during the summer, which he noted throughout the episode. But he made sure to remind viewers that he’d return once his break ends after Labor Day.
“We will back back though, very soon,“ he said toward the end of the episode. ”We’ll be back on the air, live. I’ve been refueling, so to speak.”
Stern made no direct mention of a U.S Sun report that claimed SiriusXM, which has paid Stern hundreds of millions for his show since 2006, plans to cancel it once his latest five-year, $500 million deal expires at the end of the year.
Instead, he used the “surprise” episode of the show to interview Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich about the band’s new Maximum Metallica channel on the satellite radio network. The two also used the hour-long episode to reminisce on the late Ozzy Osbourne and the Oasis reunion tour.
SiriusXM has not responded to the reports of the cancellation, further fueling a right-wing outrage cycle that tied the Sun report to Stern’s unabashedly liberal views. A source told the Sun that a Stern cancellation would likely be connected to “the political climate.”
Stern found out about the report from a Google alert, according to the Daily Mail, and only fielded a phone call from ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel to discuss it. A representative for Kimmel did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The report dropped after a “team building” gathering of Stern’s 95-person staff in New York, according to the Mail. Stern then scheduled the surprise show, the paper reported.
SiriusXM did not respond to questions about whether the last-minute show was scheduled to respond to the news.
While Stern has not commented publicly on the report, his former sidekick John Melendez—known as “Stuttering John”—pushed back on X against those who wanted to condemn Stern for his politics.
“If Howard Stern is getting canceled because of his political leanings, then we are not becoming a Fascist nation… We are one!” wrote Melendez, who left the show in 2004 before it moved to SiriusXM.
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