Coalition for Progressive Radio San Diego » Talk Radio & The Conspiracy To Kill

Talk Radio & The Conspiracy To Kill

Posted: August 10, 2008 at 6:49 pm / By: / Categories: News and Announcements

Dear Friends-

Rory O’Connor does a good job of telling it like it is in this excerpt from the book “Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio” (AlterNet Books, 2008). , putting the onus on the right wing shock jocks to lighten up their fare lest more people bite the dust. John

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John P. Falchi

San Diego, CA 92107

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Talk Radio and the

Conspiracy to Kill

By Rory O’Connor

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AlterNet. Posted August 1, 2008.

Would Jim Adkisson have killed without prompting from extreme right-wing talkers?
Normally I ignore such ignorant attacks on my person, along with absurd charges like the one that Barack Obama is somehow engaged in a stealth “conspiracy to kill” talk radio. I raise them now only because of a real conspiracy to kill — one that took two lives in a Tennessee church recently. After a troubled man named Jim Adkisson murdered two and wounded seven, it was reported that he had books by shock jocks Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly in his home. (What wasn’t widely reported is that radio station WNOW-FM in Knoxville airs shock jocks Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz and Mark Levin every weekday. Given the killer’s professed hateful attitudes towards liberals and homosexuals, it’s at least as likely that he was influenced by the hateful speech Savage and the others spew forth on the public airwaves as by their books … )

So when these and other shock jocks regularly employ and promote hate speech over the public airwaves aimed at women, minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, foreigners, Islam and its adherents, and anyone else they perceive as an opponent, dehumanizing them with terms like ‘feminazis,’ ‘hos,’ ’slanty-eyed gooks’ and the like … and when they consistently blur the borders between news, opinion and entertainment, then quickly retreat when challenged, claiming it’s just ‘good fun,’ asking why you’re being so ‘politically correct,’ and demanding that you just ‘change the channel’ … and their audience is angry and armed — what do you expect to happen?

Are the shock jocks creating a climate where such acts are somehow deemed acceptable? Do they have blood on their hands if others — albeit a few, marginalized, desperate and deranged listeners — act on their poisonous rhetoric? Would Jim Adkisson have killed without prompting from extreme right wing talkers? We’ll never know — but isn’t it time to step back and think about the effect this sort of debased dialogue is having on our democracy and society? It’s not ‘just entertainment’ any more — if indeed it ever was. Instead, it’s now literally a deadly serious business, and we all need to examine our accountability — as well as to look for new strategies to contain the spread of hate speech in our media — before someone else gets killed.

In the last few months alone, Michael Reagan has called for murder on-air; Rush Limbaugh has hoped for riots in Denver at the Democratic National Convention and spoken about a non-existent tape of Michelle Obama castigating ‘Whitey’; Bill O’Reilly has mentioned Michelle Obama and a lynching party in the same breath; Don Imus has (again) engaged in racially charged remarks; and Michael Savage has called autistic children ‘idiots’ and ‘morons’ and charged that both autism and asthma are ‘rackets.’

As previously noted, the real racket is the shock jock racket. You know, the one where everyone gets paid — Savage, Limbaugh (to the tune of 400 million dollars), Hannity (100 million), etc. — but also local stations like WOR in New York City, which expressed ‘regret’ but took ‘no responsibility’ for Savage’s remarks; national distributors like Talk Radio Networks — the second largest provider of syndicated talk shows — and its headman Mark Masters, who puts Savage on 350 stations reaching 8 million listeners every week; and of course their corporate advertisers and sponsors. So let’s pressure the corporations who are using the public airwaves but not serving the public interest — and let’s challenge the shock jocks whose dehumanizing talk may be leading to terror and hate acts such as that which played out so tragically in a church in Knoxville.

In remarks given at my recent book launch party at the Tolerance Center, I specifically warned about shock jocks’ hate speech and the potential for some listener actually to take their advice literally, and to act on it in a real world “conspiracy to kill.” Some attendees later told me “You called it.” I hope not.

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O’Connor is the author of “Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio” (AlterNet Books, 2008). O’Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

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