The startling "public service announcement" broadcast by Arizona's CAVE 97.7 FM for two years is now off the air.

"Never keep paper pictures, tapes, or films of naked juveniles where anyone else can find them," is the advisory PSA that late-night listeners to CAVE frequently heard, narrated by station owner Paul Lotsof. "In many cases, the penalty for possession of pictures is worse than the penalty for murder."

Lotsof went on to give very specific advice about how to avoid child porn charges:

You should understand that your Internet provider could report you to the police if they catch you looking at a website featuring naked juveniles... 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.

Earlier this week, Tucson news station KVOA got wind of the PSA and interviewed Lotsof about it. The station owner said he feels the sentences for possession of child pornography are draconian. Arizona allows for sentences of 10-24 years per violation of child-porn laws.

"There's no picture in the world that's that dangerous,” Lotsof told a KVOA reporter.

Following the KVOA report, Lotsof and CAVE have garnered national media attention, including reports today in The Washington Post and on NPR.

The radio station, located in Benson, a town just east of Tucson, is now the subject of a local uproar. An online petition asking for the station to be shut down has more than 1,000 signatures, and advertisers have fled. The local sheriff isn't convinced that the PSA itself is legal.

"In 33 years of doing this, I've never seen a media source put out such a message," said Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels. "So we need to look at this and look at it very carefully to see if this is a crime."

"This is a disgusting and unacceptable public service announcement, and this type of propaganda encourages evil behavior," the sheriff added in a post about the matter on his Facebook page.

Lotsof draws a bright line between the act of creating child pornography and owning the images associated with it.

"The difference is [in] one case, you're molesting children and abusing them, causing children to do things that are not natural for children to do, and [in] the other case, they're just possessing pictures," he said in the KVOA interview. "There's no connection between those two."

Yesterday, he told KVOA that he'll keep broadcasting even if he loses advertising income.

"I have enough money that I can sustain this radio station on the air with no advertising for years," Lotsof said.