Three months ago, a reporter for all-News KYW Philadelphia called with an interesting question: why was there such inconsistency in the way that radio stations edited current hits? My best guess at the time was that as AC and Hot AC stations started to take more of their product from Mainstream CHR, there were more hits with potential lyric issues being played on a wider swath of stations that had different needs.

The inconsistency hasn’t just been different handling of lyrical issues by different stations, however. I’ve also noticed a couple of recent instances of songs being edited differently over the course of their radio life. A few weeks ago, as Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” peaked at CHR, I heard a station that I’m pretty sure once played it unedited now obscuring the words “gun” and “bullet,” something I noticed more overall as the nine-month-old Alternative hit reached power rotation at Mainstream Top 40.

There’s been a consistency issue with lyrical edits for more than a decade—something further exacerbated in the mid-’00s by the Janet Jackson controversy. The lyric issues flared when Alternative and Hip-Hop were center-lane music styles at Top 40, but they didn’t flag when the hits changed. As both mainstream pop music and even Country became hipper, there seemed to be a concerted effort by writers and artists to show that they could be edgy, too. Which is how you end up with Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.”

As was the case a decade ago, current songs seem to be under a different sort of scrutiny from library titles on other formats. Even in 2000, stations were obscuring the “got yourself a gun” line in A3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” even though it was key to the storyline. Nobody, however, was going back and editing Eric Clapton’s “I Shot The Sheriff.” Or, for that matter, trying to play Clapton’s “Cocaine” without its hook. A decade ago, you might have argued that there were no teenagers listening to Classic Rock, but their increased presence among the audience doesn’t seem to have changed that policy.

For a long time, the radio strategy was, in most cases, to let the label decide what should be edited. That added to the inconsistency, and it didn’t necessarily protect stations, as evidenced when the FCC fined KKMG Colorado Springs, Colo., for playing the radio edit of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” The multiple edits that now exist prove that stations are taking control of the issue, but to what intent? Is there actual worry about content? Or just an attempt to stanch complaints as they come in?

Is radio now concerned, in a way that it was not for nine months, with the subject matter of “Pumped Up Kicks”? Did an advertiser just notice the lyrics? A sales manager? A manager’s spouse? Or did it take until the song reached power for listeners to really absorb the chorus? An ironically catchy song about school shootings doesn’t become otherwise just because a station excises two words, particularly once everybody knows what the lyrics are, and when they can still be heard elsewhere in the market.

There are a lot more questions here. Does storytelling, even when violent, earn a song any extra creative license? Are individual words—even those that aren’t FCC issues per se—more troubling than subject matter? What does one not want their pre-teen singing? Is Rihanna’s bleeped “don’t let the bastards/get you down” more of an issue than the never-edited “sex in the air/but I love the smell of it”? In an era when you wouldn’t want to be asked about anything in “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” it’s hard enough for parents to parent consistently. And it’s obviously far harder for radio.

Should radio stations convene listener groups at the outset when they’re worried about what to edit on a song? While the MPAA movie ratings panel is famous for inconsistencies of its own, that would at least be a pro-active stance. Failing that, stations need to have a larger, more consistent policy on what’s okay on their radio station—and one that goes beyond editing a word here or there.