K Marx The Spot

Audio Didn't Kill the Talk Radio Stars

John Dennis and Gerry Callahan are back on the Boston airwaves after their two week suspension, but not much has changed at WEEI Radio.

On 29 September, the two esteemed members of the Boston electronic media decided to make light of the escape of an adolescent gorilla from Boston's Franklin Park Zoo. The gorilla, Little Joe, injured two children before being tranquilzied and captured.

Callahan: "They caught him at a bus stop, right — he was like waiting to catch a bus out of town."

Dennis: "Yeah, yeah — he’s a Metco gorilla."

Callahan: "Heading out to Lexington."

Dennis: "Exactly."

Among the Boston media, only the weekly alternative paper, the the Boston Phoenix took proper umbrage. In a recent editorial, it noted that

[t]he laggard response of station management is instructive. At first, when the public was led to believe that the comments were made by Dennis alone (WEEI surely knew better), Dennis was forced to apologize. As the furor grew, Dennis was given a two-day suspension. Then, last Friday, the public-affairs program Greater Boston, on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), played an audiotape it had obtained that showed Callahan was in on the yuks.

Dennis and Callahan had earned over the past few years a well-earned reputation for a show that pushed the boundaries of good taste, and their antics made their show very popular among listeners and advertisers.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh or Jimmy the Greek, whose every television utterances were sure to be preserved for posterity, Dennis and Callahan opereated under the assumption that no one who cared about propriety was going to tape any particular show. The Associated Press paid particular attention to their first day back on the air.

“I never made a racist connection in my mind, which certainly makes me careless, inconsiderate and clearly out of touch, all of which I plead guilty to on every single count. But it does not make me a racist,” said John Dennis, co-host of the “Dennis & Callahan” show on WEEI-AM. “That’s not who I am, it is not what’s in my heart.”

...Dennis said Tuesday that the potential racist connotations escaped him when he made his comment. “Do you honestly think if I made a racist connection in my mind about an escaped zoo animal and a school program that I would be stupid enough to say it, and commit professional suicide?” Dennis said. Callahan apologized and said it was time to move on.

Dennis's apology is instructive. He claims that making a racist comment would be professional suicide. Hardly! As his station's response showed, what he and Callahan said led to suspensions only after the exchange was played to a wider audience.

It is hard not to read the pair's remarks and find that they were not making a racist connection between the (primarily black) schoolchildren who live near the zoo and the gorillas in the zoo. If Little Joe had escaped in the morning and haunted a Metco bus stop, then joking that he was waiting for a Metco bus would have been apropos—insensitive and perhaps tasteless, if anyone had been hurt, but apropos nonetheless—. But Little Joe escaped in the evening, and was caught at a city bus stop that had nothing to do with Metco, or school buses at all. The only students who take Metco buses to Lexington are minority students who enroll in that primarily white suburban school district. I submit that Dennis and Callahan knew exactly what they were saying, and what it meant. Did they feel guilty, or just ashamed that they had been caught?

The Spineless "Liberal" Media

As usual, if you want to read the truth about the Israeli government, you won't find it in the so-called liberal media in the United States. Instead, you need to read Ha'aretz, in your choice of Hebrew or English. In the instant case, the subject is the nuclear weapons capabilities of Iran and Israel.

Mossad agents supply foreign journalists with information about Iran's nuclear efforts; such foreign reports, the Mossad expects, support the international campaign to thwart Iran's nuclear weapons program. Sometimes, the foreign media are used to deliver deterrence-oriented messages about Israel's capabilities and intentions.

Sources say one Mossad official was recently commended by his superiors after a leading U.S. newspaper released a report about progress notched in Iran's nuclear weapons procurement program.

The so-called liberal media passed along the Bush administration's lies about Iraq's nuclear weapons "program" and is passing along now half-truths about Iran's program. Yet the mainstream press corps still can't ask the United States why it refuses even to acknowledge that Israel has scores of nuclear weapons and has had deployed them for years.

All of our government's concern about "weapons of mass destruction" is hypocritical enough when we have a vast arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons, but when its concern disspiates on the correct side of the Jordan, it's a wonder that anyone in the Arab world believes a single word that anyone in the United States government ever says.

Following the Wrong Leader

It's hardly news now that General Jerry Boykin, a deputy undersecretary of defense who is instrumental in the Pentagon's actions against terrorism, is a religious fanatic who sees the United States as a "Christian nation" chosen by God to combat Satan.

I am thrilled to hear that General Boykin has dispelled any notions that the United States government was pro-demonic.

But I do worry. The last government to make it a habit of calling its enemies Satanic was the revolutionary Iranian government of Ayatollah Khomeini, not exactly the sort of leader to emulate if your object is to win friends and influence people.

Class Warfare for the Bourgeoisie

Nathan Newman correctly notes that the Leninists in California supermarkets are not the workers, but the supermarket owners. The supermarkets are trying to charge the workers more for health insurance on the grounds that non-union employer Wal-Mart would screw them even worse.

Out in California, the unions were planning to strike only Vons supermarkets, but Kroger, Safeway and Albertsons management decided to lock out all their employees as well: The supermarkets, however, said a strike against one company would be considered a strike against all three. In a joint statement, they said Albertsons and Ralphs would lock out employees during the dispute.

Corporate leaders know that unions are effective tools for lower-class Americans to have economic or political clout, and they will do almost anything to avoid them.

Ironically, their best defense here could be a good offense. It would certainly help Vons or Safeway or Kroger or Albertsons if Wal-Mart had to pay union scale. None would dare—because opposition to unions is essential to the politically correct mantra at most business schools—but the chains would do better by using the money that they plan to spend on replacement workers to finance some strategically placed card-check campaigns!

If at First You Don't Succeed, Lie, Lie Again

Now that AIDS has become a scourge in Africa for heterosexual men and women, the Roman Catholic Church has decided that AIDS isn't the real enemy: condoms are. The Guardian reports that the Vatican is making widespread, untrue, claims about condoms to bolster its blinkered notions about sex and procreation.

The church's claims are revealed in a BBC1 Panorama programme, "Sex and the Holy City," to be broadcast on Sunday. The president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, told the programme: "The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom.

"These margins of uncertainty... should represent an obligation on the part of the health ministries and all these campaigns to act in the same way as they do with regard to cigarettes, which they state to be a danger."

The WHO has condemned the Vatican's views, saying: "These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million."

The organisation says "consistent and correct" condom use reduces the risk of HIV infection by 90%. There may be breakage or slippage of condoms—but not, the WHO says, holes through which the virus can pass.

Religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, and the leaders are yet again calling for more opium. Better to condemn potentiially millions of faithful followers to death than to tell them the truth: that the Church's teachings on condoms have been, and continue to be, negligently pernicious.

Red Sox Brass Do It Again

If there is one team in American professional sports that should be especially vigilant against racism, it is the Boston Red Sox. A prejudice against African-American players permated its management for decades, so much so that it was the last major-league baseball team to hire any African-American ballplayers. Boston loves its Red Sox, but, as a recent book makes pellucid, there is much not to love about the team.

Red Sox management has missed an easy opportunity to make a stand against racism. Last Monday, the hosts of WEEI's morning drive-time "Dennis and Callahan" program decided that the best way to make light of the escape of a gorilla from Boston's Franklin Park Zoo was to equate gorillas with African-American children:

After Callahan observed the gorilla, Little Joe, was captured near a bus stop, Dennis said "Yeah, yeah. He was a Metco gorilla."

"Heading out to Lexington," Callahan added.

"Yeah, exactly," Dennis replied.

(Metco is a voluntary Massachusetts program that sends kids from inner-city Boston to schools in the Boston suburbs.)

Dennis and Callahan missed the attention of the national media, which concerned itself with Rush Limbaugh's recent on-air stupidity. But they did catch the attention of groups in Boston that called for their pubishment. Originally, WEEI suspended Dennis for two days. Then, after a tape of the incident showed up, WEEI suspended Dennis and Callahan each for two weeks. Meanwhile, exactly two advertisers have pulled their advertising from WEEI in protest. Apparently the white racist demographic is too important to tick off.

So, where do the Red Sox stand on this? Would the Sox dare consider moving their games off of WEEI (nominally an all-sports station)? Or at the very least, shave its executives stop appearing on the Dennis and Callahan show?

Not a chance. According to the Boston Globe, nothing has changed.

Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino said that he expects to continue appearing on WEEI's morning talk program, "Dennis and Callahan," despite the controversy that led to a two-week suspension of the program's hosts. "They're our flagship station," Lucchino said, "and I'm going to continue to work with our flagship station. I'm not there to comment on political issues, I'm there to comment on baseball issues. As long as the flagship station wants me, I'll be there."

It must be very important to the Red Sox to capture that white racist demographic.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

Anyone reading this surely knows by now that the California recall passed and that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the next governor of California. It is interesting that the vote for the recall is less than the combined vote for the two most prominent Republicans: Schwarzenegger and McClintock. Minnesotans can now breathe easier, since the 1998 tenure of Jesse Ventura no longer can represent the ascension of the most unqualified chief executiev in American history.

Hidden amongst all the hubbub of the recall is that Californian voters did reject, by wide margins, Propositions 53 and 54. The first would have exacerbated the state's budget morass by establishing a high floor on state spending on infrastructure. The second would have made any sort of state-level anti-discrimination work impossible by prohibiting the state from collecting virtually any data on race. Both of these measures were damnably inane measures, and kudos to the majority of voters for kicking them to the curb.

As for kicking Schwarzenegger to the curb, voters will not have long to wait.

Bad News and Good News for Rush Limbaugh

There is bad news and good news for Rush Limbaugh.

The bad news is that news reports link him to illegal purchases of prescription narcotics, including OxyContin.

The good news is that he now has a good explanation for his knackered comments earlier this week. The government-mandated warnings for Oxycontin include these side effects, reported by 1% to 5% of users: "In descending order of frequency they were anorexia, nervousness, insomnia, fever, confusion, diarrhea, abdominal pain, dyspepsia, rash, anxiety, euphoria, dyspnea, postural hypotension, chills, twitching, gastritis, abnormal dreams, thought abnormalities, and hiccups." [Emphasis added]

It's a Small Mind After All

It is only a matter of time before Rush Limbaugh blames The Liberal Media for his quick exit from the football preview show "Sunday NFL Countdown." Limbaugh certainly knew that ESPN is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Corporation, the bane of conservatives for treating gays and lesbians like people. So, it's hardly surprising that his corporate masters might not appreciate racially insensitive comments.

Of course, Limbaugh brought the attention on himself when he criticized Donovan McNabb earlier this week:

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well," Limbaugh said on Sunday's show. "There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

The media is not "desirous that a black quarterback do well"; if anything, the media, as well as many football fans, are simply happy to see that black players get to play quarterback. Thankfully, the days that a black quarterbacks get shunted to safety or cornerback while white players got to play in the "skill positions" are gone.

In a speech today at the National Association of Broadcasters, Limbaugh explained the difference between television, even cable television, and radio.

To draw in listeners, "we want controversy," he told the broadcasters meeting. "Nobody tells me what I can and can't say" on the radio, he said.

How true that statement is. In Boston this week, on a popular morning drive-time show, John Dennis make Limbaugh look like a amateur. Of course, Dennis has festered for years on a sports show on the radio, where boorishness, jingoism, and filth are normal. The Boston Globe has some of the only reporting on the matter, so far:

A prominent WEEI radio talk show host apologized on the air yesterday for comparing the escaped Franklin Park Zoo gorilla to a Metco student waiting for a bus. During Monday morning's Dennis & Callahan Show, host John Dennis reportedly said the animal, which rested briefly at a bus stop during the episode Sunday, was "probably a Metco gorilla waiting for a bus to take him to Lexington." Responding to complaints, Dennis yesterday said the remark "was extremely insensitive." WEEI program director Jason Wolfe said Dennis and the station also had apologized to school and Metco officials. The station also has offered Metco officials public service spots to talk about the program.

No wonder that Limbaugh prefers radio to television.

Update: the Associated Press now has a decent article on what Dennis said.