Four of the stations – in St. Louis, Portland, Ore., Fort Myers, Fla., and Knoxville, Tenn. – are affiliates of the WB broadcast network and all are owned by Acme Television. The CBS affiliate in Birmingham also gave Stern the hook.

"We encourage creativity and ... we don't believe in censorship," Acme President and COO Doug Gealy said yesterday, "but we felt that for our viewers in these markets, the show had gone over the line." Acme execs have been in constant contact with distributor Eyemark Entertainment regarding the content of "The Howard Stern Radio Show," he said. "I think Stern is a very intelligent, creative guy, but it wasn't transposing to television," he added.

A spokesman for the show declined to comment.

Stern's show, consisting mostly of repackaged video clips from his popular daily radio show, debuted in August. It's distributed by CBS-owned Eyemark and airs on nearly all CBS-owned TV stations, as well as affiliates of CBS and other networks nationally. It's the only broadcast television show to carry a "mature audiences" content rating.

Although the Stern show has improved station audiences considerably in its Saturday 11 p.m. time slot, its performance is nowhere near fulfilling Stern's promise to beat NBC's "Saturday Night Live." For the week ending Oct. 4, Stern's show was seen in 1.4 million homes to "SNL's" 5.8 million.

For some station executives, the audience improvement isn't sufficient to compensate for the content controversy. Before this week, it already had been dumped in Lubbock, Tex., San Diego and Phoenix.