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On June 28,1996 the Los Angeles Times printed this
article written by Howard Rosenberg.
No Freedom From Their Speech
Descending radio's evolutionary scale . . . . .
The National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts met in Washington last
week, reaffirming that anyone with lips can join the club. Not
that this is quite headline news. Take Kato Kaelin.
Or take Joycelyn Elders, in some ways admirable, a caring, socially
committed physician who fearlessly says her piece. Yet she was
also one of the least articulate, most misspoken high-ranking U.S.
government officials in history when it came to expressing herself
extemporaneously. Someone who self-incinerated as President Clinton's
surgeon general in part precisely because she couldn't talk. Someone
so incoherent as an off-the-cuff communicator that in her last
public forum on behalf of the administration she gave the impression
of suggesting that schools give instruction in masturbation in
AIDS prevention. What she meant to say, surely, was that schools
should mention masturbation as an alternative, which was controversial
enough, but hardly as outrageous 'as advocating publicly funded
courses in self-pleasuring.
"
Words are strange things," she said after the resulting storm
had blown her from office. "Once they are out, you can't get
them back." Actually, hers zoomed back at her like lethal
boomerangs. And after she was forced to resign her post?
Yup, she found work as a radio talk show host, her syndicated program
lasting five months before expiring last December from weak interest.
That Elders flopped as liberal counterpoint to the teeming hive
of conservative radio talkers was not surprising. That such a verbal
klutz would ever merit such a gig, however, was astounding. But
listen, "astounding" is what much of talk radio is all
about.
Consider, for example, that gathering of radio schmoozers in Washington
last week. There were stunning similarities between some of its
attendees and topics hashed over at a conference of animal rights
activists held simultaneously at the nation's capital. One of the
latter's most dramatic moments was the screening of "Almost
Human," an award-winning "20/20" segment about biomedical
testing on chimpanzees who live out their years confined inside
tiny cages.
It's now apparent that the great species barrier may not be so
great after all. Like chimps, incredibly, radio talk-show hosts
(the brightest of them, at least) can make and use tools. Like
chimps, some of these talkers (although exact percentages are unknown)
appear capable of rational thought. Like chimps, their behavior
is encoded in their genes. And also applying to some radio talkers
is what famed researcher Jane Goodall told the World Congress for
Animals last week about chimps she studied for years in the African
wild: "They have a dark side to their nature."
Yes, there is the small minority of radio hosts (KABC radio's Dennis
Prager comes prominently to mind, regardless of whether you share
his views) who present ideas rather than banal flaming rhetoric
tied to every banner headline. When it comes to qualifying for
cages, however, many other radio talkers are, indeed, just the
ticket. Heading the list are Howard Stern (when his rollicking
free form wit turns ugly)' and twice-suspended, New Jersey talker
Paul Kehler, who reportedly has dubbed the anti-abortion rights
crowd "a bunch of fat yentas' who are just jealous because
they can't get any" and accused a local school board official
of earning her job through oral sex.
One radio host with an even greater tendency toward darkness is
G. Gordon Liddy, who earned a Freedom of Speech award from the
National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts in 1995 after taking heat
and getting dropped by a handful of stations for advising his audience
how to fatally shoot federal agents in self defense.
Liddy, who spent more than four years in prison for his role in
Watergate, was succeeded as the association's Poster Talker this
year by a trio of Freedom of Speech awardees, one being fiery Bob
Grant, who was bumped from his popular WABC show in New York after
making a snide crack about Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's death
in a plane crash that capped a history of Grant making comments
on the air widely regarded as racist. Radio audiences not always
being discriminating, Grant is now a sizzling item on another New
York station. What a world. Witless Cincinnati Reds owner Marge
Schott is labeled a bigot, and is ordered by baseball to take a
walk. The rabidly loopy Grant is labeled a bigot, and gets an award.
But it gets even goofier. Sharing the Freedom of Speech award with
Grant this year is celebrity Harvard law professor/O.J. Simpson
defender Alan (Build a Media Soapbox and He Will Come) Dershowitz
who, prior to Grant being fired, was bounced from his own WABC
radio program after calling Grant a "racist" and "despicable." And
get this, the third honoree is none other than Michael Eisner,
chairman of the Wait Disney Co., which owns WABC, the station that
fired his fellow recipients.
So . . . here's the scorecard in this lst Amendment Disneyland:
Grant gets the award for having the courage to be despicably nasty
on the air. Dershowitz gets the award for having the courage to
blast Grant for being despicably nasty. And Eisner gets the award
for heading the company whose station that had the chutzpah to
fire both Grant and Dershowitz for exercising free speech. Obviously,
the question that ignorant souls frequently ask about sentient
animals - Is there really a mind here? - is instead applicable
to those handing out the association's Freedom of Speech award.
Speaking of animals, meanwhile, the New York Daily News reported
that Grant called Eisner a "skunk," and that after the
dueling Grant and Dershowitz received their awards separately at
the talkers' confab, they shook hands and posed for pictures. It
was the civil thing to do, proving that they are, indeed, what
many observers suspected they were. Almost human. |
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