Posted on 07/09/2003 8:17:37 AM PDT by republicofdavis
Violence for actions directed at someone else may not be defensible but a person had better be prepared to defend himself for insulting words he speaks.
I had a friend who was out with his fiancee, his band members, and another band (on the same bill at a festival).
One of the other band's members was hitting on the fiancee. He said, "Why don't you come back to my hotel room?"
My friend told him, "that's my fiancee". The other guy then told him, "well then you can watch."
A fight was averted but you can understand that such words would provoke such an action and figure into any assault charge.
Some communities even permit the man to KILL the other man if he's found in bed with his wife (crime of passion).
Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk and realize that the internet may put a barrier between people who are communicating but there are very real people on the other "end" of the conversation.
Very few of the people who try to get on Rush's show get through. They must reach on open line (not a busy signal), they must get through the call screener (and a liberal-but-learning friend of mine said that Bo Snerdly is real tough, he was always honest about his topic but he never got through, I don't get the feeling that my friend felt rejected because he was a liberal, either). After they get through the call screener they must want on the line for anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes or more (open line Fridays may be more of an exception to this although the lines probably stack up there too).
A troll has to be real dedicated to call Rush's show and put up with all of that. The troll would also have to listen to Rush's show for an hour or so while trying to get through/waiting online. Real dedication.
Even with all of that Rush will let liberals hang themselves with their own rope and go on with their crackpot theories. He may mute them down so he can counter their claims but he doesn't generally hang up on them.
If a caller does try to make a quick insult at Rush, the 7 second delay on the radio allows it to be dumped before it can be heard. Rush will comment that the person showed their true stripes and move on.
Rush is more of a class act than Michael Savage but Rush also employs excellent call screeners who have to stay on the button. This was part of MS-NBC's problem. Caller ID should make it even easier to detect repeat callers.
He was right there with the trichinosis comment as well.
He was a "quick wit" even if he was a "dim wit".
This wasn't the case. They would have pulled the plug on his immediately if they thought he went that far over the line. A "breaking news item" could have run, a rerun could have been run, they could have cut to a commercial, etc.
Consider if an on air personality suddenly started voicing holocaust denial talking points. There is no reason to leave someone on the air (even till the end of their own show) in some circumstances.
It's not government's job to determine this, it is the job of standards and practices. This was a decision that was held until the heads could be brought into it (and possibly an email campaign started).
It is a double standard though because other "offensive" hosts have remained on the air until their ratings fell and viewers notified advertisers of a boycott.
I don't think that NBC needed to wait for that to happen (and I don't know that it would have happened) but certainly there is more patience shown with leftist hosts and little if any lastig outrage.
A Florida liberal talk show host announed "news" that Katherine Harris died in a plane crash (and he followed this with "Yes!!!"). The story didn't even go national.
Katherine Harris alive despite Miami radio host's announcement (hate radio)
As to your Dixie Chicks comment, McCain had them come to Congress to speak out against their blacklist today. The Republicans do not work towards improving the double standard.
I did not hear Michael Savage point out any of this information so it does not come from him.
There may also be heated arguments (with actual violent statements, whether the threat is genuine or not) that come from email exchanges back and forth or even from things he said to provoke the response on his weblog.
Basically we are getting Baghdad Bob's side of this story and he will spin it as he wants.
If he received death threats then he should go to the authorities since they deal with such matters. If he does not then I assume that there is little meat to the claims.
That said, Hong Kong films have a number of AIDS jokes/insults in them. No one is shown with graphic AIDS sores. Maybe they offer some gallows humor on SARS over there as well.
Tiny Tim recorded a cut about how Santa won't be around because he has AIDS this year.
It is an illness. Anyone could get it. There has been an extensive campaign to tell Americans that it is not (just) a homosexual disease.
It would seem that AIDS is unlike other illnesses though because it has been politicized. The CDC doesn't even track infections the same as with other STDs (anonymity is big).
Homosexual are also a politically protected class of individual.
This was Michael Savage's crime, not being PC.
BTW, should administrators pull all ONION threads since they made a fake article that was in bad taste refering to Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's?
While I agree that he is brutish at times, I don't think that what he said on MS-NBC is worth termination. We'll have to agree to disagree on that point.
G.G. Liddy was knocked off the air in Houston and other cities after OKC because of the press coming down hard on right wing talk radio. Nothing he said was tied to that incident but the public perception was there (that he created a climate of hate).
If FReepers believe that this is the case with Michael Savage then they should stand on principle and get him removed from their radio stations. It doesn't affect me; I am not a Michael Savage listener but I think that he is being hung out to dry.
Could FR come back to haunt any freepers who participated in a ZOT thread?
No, he has issues with radical perverts like Ginsberg!
It was not an insignifigant bump in the road of Mr. Stern's career path, to be sure. But Stern is a fairly strong-minded man. After he was picked up by a competing local station, he went on to compete against his former bosses with the zeal that only a truly spurned man will know. In due course, his former station withered on the vine, leaving Stern to cackle with glee.
There are those here who dislike Savage, yes, but who here thinks of Savage as weak-minded? Who here thinks that that Savage is not vindictive? Certainly it would not please him to hear me say so, but for all of his poignant humor, I would place vindictiveness at the tippy-top of Michael's qualities, and I shudder to think of what he would like to do to KSFO ratings in his slot...
In fairness, let me say that I would do EXACTLY the same thing.
Let's think back, years back, to when Michael started, in order to divine the future: As Michael's radio career slowly first started to take off, it became less and less a means to carve out a living, serving more and more as a bludgeoning tool with which to beat his former academic foes: "I wanted to count myself among your number, and you hurt me".
Recall that they, too, pushed him off of the Ivory Tower. They, too, thought Michael would go ker-splat.
Instead, Michael thrived on the outside, and as his ratings swelled, he wasn't "big" about his win. He greedily salted up the dagger, and set about his gristly revenge with a clinical precision.
And so it shall be this time.
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