The appeal of the dump button is obvious. It wipes out the square word and makes it seem like nothing happened. Factor says, for the most part, radio stations prefer the dump button to that intrusive, obnoxious bleap. Maria bustios, the culture writer, thinks that silence is taking away important context. And she says the bleep sound is actually better.
There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are other options, too, like silence -- so why did this particular *bleep* sound become ubiquitous?
Bleep!