| Compiled by Luke Ford
The Right Rush-es Onward
The talk of the '94 election was the Limbaugh-led revolution.
Well, in 1996, conservatives are turning up the volume even louder.
Where's the opposing view? That's what liberals are asking.
By Judith Michaelson, Los Angeles Times Sunday January 28, 1996
...Afternoons there is Dennis Prager of KABC-AM, attacking what
he calls affirmative action "quotas" that California's
Democratic Party is using in compiling its delegation to the party's
1996 national convention. It's one of the reasons, he declares,
that "I am asking people to vote Republican. . . . So often
it is the people who sound so much more tolerant and open [who]
will have really destructive ideas for the civilization."
With the coming long march of caucuses, primaries, conventions,
campaigns and debates leading to the election finale in November,
talk radio is alive with the sound of politics. Actually, like perpetual
political campaigns, it never really stopped.
So, with just 281 candidate-shopping days left to decide on the
presidency and the control of Congress, what is the state of political
talk radio in Southern California?
On KABC-AM (790), KFI-AM (640) and KMPC-AM (710), in prime weekday
slots, the regular hosts on issues-oriented programs are all male,
a shade more minority than two years ago and preponderantly conservative.
In the tricky arena of political labeling, there's not only Rush
Limbaugh conservative but libertarian conservative, neoconservative
and an angry conservatism of those espousing a dogma that the best
government is that which governs least--if at all. Though the hosts
are hardly conservative on every issue or even discuss politics
all the time, a rightward tone and emphasis prevails.
KABC's Prager, citing what he considers a liberal tilt to the national
press and network TV, dismisses such concerns: "I'll make a
trade with liberals," he says. "You give us the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; ABC, NBC and
CBS--and we'll give you the talk shows."
In Los Angeles as around the nation, talk radio leans conservative
for two reasons: (1) The audience for it is perceived to be conservative,
and(2) Limbaugh, whose phenomenal success helped revive the format
and spawned a generation of copycats. In 1989, there were 350 news/talk
stations; today there are nearly 1,200, and Limbaugh is on 650 of
them.
Now the most-conservative title may belong to KABC. Last summer,
the station bounced liberal lawyer Gloria Allred from weekday afternoons
to weekends, gave the noon-1 p.m. hour of Jackson's show to Prager
and replaced Ira Fistell in the 11 p.m.-4 a.m. slot with the more
conservative Art Bell.
"In some sense, I think the [point] is not why KABC has gotten
conservative but noting that it was really the last to go,"
says USC law professor Susan Estrich, campaign manager for 1988
Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis and a KABC weekend
host. "A lot of the energy in politics is on the conservative
side, and that's being led by--and in turn reflected in--talk radio.
The conventional wisdom right now is that that's where the ratings
are."
"The talent's on the conservative side," maintains former
KFI weekend host Hugh Hewitt, a conservative commentator on KCET-TV
Channel 28's nightly "Life & Times." "Program
directors, whether David G. Hall [of KFI] or George Green [general
manager of KABC and KMPC], want talent plus interesting subject
matter. It may be [that] everything on the left . . . is merely
an echo or sounds so throaty. It just gets so old. . . ."
Managers of talk radio stations insist that it is in just this
way that political balance is achieved--by callers taking on the
host.
"If Dennis Prager or Michael Jackson or Larry Elder, whomever--if
they don't allow the opposite viewpoint and the chance to be heard,
we go right to their throat," says KABC/KMPC's Green.
Prager says that if he didn't hear from callers that his show changed
minds, "I would quit."
'America is tired of all the bull----, of the liberal nature of
the government, of the bureaucracy. Americans want to stamp out
crime. . . . The death penalty can be a deterrent. . . . Affirmative
action programs have worked, but at this point we should be moving
away [from them]. . .. It's time for us to balance our budget, to
manage our state and federal government like we manage our families."
Rush Limbaugh? Dennis Prager? Xavier Hermosillo? No, that's George
Green, general manager of KABC and KMPC, chatting in his office
on South La Cienega Boulevard about his own views--and denying that
sharing his opinions is a prerequisite to getting hired there.
Regarding the decision of the Stephen S. Wise synagogue
to rename its high school after the Milken family:
Radio commentator Dennis Prager, a member of Stephen S. Wise Temple
who is an active speaker and writer on Jewish ethical issues, said
he saw no problems with the decision.
"If one member of a philanthropic family does wrong, and if
that invalidates the family name, then clearly the Kennedy Center,
Stanford University and the Carnegie Foundation all should change
their names," Prager said.
(LA TIMES 9-95)
GAY RABBI - LA TIMES
One dissenter to the acceptance of gay behavior in Jewish religious
life is writer and radio talk-show host Dennis Prager, a conservative
Jewish analyst.
"I would have intellectual respect for the [gay] movement
to equate homosexual relations with heterosexual relations if that
movement took a different position on bisexual behavior--because
bisexuals have a choice," Prager said. "That the homosexual
movement supports bisexual behavior . . . means that their position
is not at all based on the argument that homosexuals have no choice.
"Rather, it is an attempt to undo the 3,000-year-old Jewish
battle to make heterosexual, monogamous love the human ideal."
Responding to Prager's remarks, Rabbi Jerry Danzig, executive director
of Valley Beth Shalom, said that human makeup is so complex "that
I would not be so presumptuous to say even bisexual people are choosing
at any one moment."
Goor said the only real issue is this: "Is there potential
for holiness, love and committed relationships between two people
of the same sex? Clearly, there are attempts in Reform and Conservative
Judaism to recognize that they too are created in God's image.
"In Jewish tradition, we live in dialogue in each generation
between the ancient text and our lives," Goor said. "The
text itself is never a clear, black-and-white statement."
Goor said he is convinced that the majority of Reform rabbis are
leaning toward approval of same-sex ceremonies for gay couples,
and he has performed such ceremonies as an associate rabbi at Temple
Judea.
Those rites have been away from the temple--but only because no
one requested them at the synagogue, he said.
"The policy of this synagogue has always been complete freedom
for the rabbis to perform whatever ceremonies they choose,"
he said.
More significant than his rabbinical freedom, however, is providing
recognition at life-cycle events, "sacred moments" from
birth to death, within one's own religious community, he said.
Los Angeles Times Tuesday October 14, 1997
On June 28,1996 the Los Angeles Times printed this article written
by Howard Rosenberg.
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
Dennis Prager on sexual harassment:
Real sexual harassment is evil, but our society has gone overboard.
Why? First, because the primary impulse behind much contemporary
feminist legislation is not liberation of women but anger at men--specifically
men's sexual nature. Second, too many men are intimidated by feminist
demands. Third, liberal politicians want women to think they need
them for protection. Sexual double standards used to be against
women; they are now against men. At work, she can wear clothing
that reveals all she wants, but if he comments on what she reveals,
he is liable for a lawsuit. Strong women are also victims of sexual
harassment hysteria. No Victorian rules portrayed women as so weak
and as so needing special protection as do America's sexual harassment
laws. (LA Times)
Forgiveness: A letter to Newsday by Bill Reel
WE'RE SUPPOSED to love people and use things. But sometimes we
love things and use people - we sin, in other words - and for that
we need forgiveness.
I paraphrase the words of a priest I heard preach an Advent mission.
He was preparing souls for Christmas by urging us to forgive and
- through contrition and penance - to be forgiven.
Resentments are fatal to my peace of mind. Unless I forgive those
who (I imagine) have trespassed against me, I can't seem to forgive
myself.
But then along comes a contrary opinion that forgiveness is too
cheap - and that forgiveness granted in the absence of repentance
trivializes evil. "The Sin of Forgiveness" - that arresting
headline topped a recent Wall Street Journal column by Dennis Prager,
a West Coast writer and radio talk show host. Forgiveness has been
devalued by Christians who bestow it casually and indiscriminately,
he argued.
Prager cited the "We forgive you, Mike" banner that Paducah,
Ky., high school students draped on their school after freshman
Michael Carneal shot and killed three fellow students and wounded
five others.
The students had no right to pardon the perpetrator of this murderous
rampage, which only the individual victims could forgive, Prager
argued, and for the school community to play God by presuming to
bestow forgiveness was blasphemy - and moral grandstanding, too,
making it all the more reprehensible.
We're too quick to forgive in our selfish quest to feel good about
ourselves, Prager opined. This is the result of a too-liberal culture
in which the only mortal sin remaining is not murder or adultery
but intolerance. Thou shalt not judge harshly! Hence a minister
preaching to a Martha's Vineyard congregation that included President
Bill Clinton last summer could piously proclaim the moral duty of
Christians to forgive Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who murdered
168 Americans.
"Considering what he did, that may be a formidable task. But
it is one that we as Christians are asked to do," the minister
sermonized.
Prager begged to differ, maintaining that Christians ought not
go around dispensing absolution at least until after mass murderers
have said they're sorry. "Though I am a Jew," he wrote,
"I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential if America's
moral decline is to be reversed, and that despite theological differences,
there is indeed a Judeo-Christian value system that has served as
the bedrock of American civilization. For those reasons I am appalled
by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness."
Theologians and ordinary people alike will differ about forgiveness
and qualifications for it. The spiritual value of asking for forgiveness
rather than granting it might emerge. A book to be published next
year, "When a Pope Asks Forgiveness," reveals that on
no fewer than 94 separate occasions during his pontificate, Pope
John Paul II has corrected erroneous judgments made by churchmen
and acknowledged past wrongs, and on 25 of these occasions the Pope
has asked for forgiveness on behalf of the church.
Some cardinals believe the Pope has said mea culpa too much. But,
according to author Luigi Accattoli, the Holy Father wants the church
to go into the third millennium with a clear conscience.
"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,"
Jesus prayed for those who crucified him. He forgave them even though
they hadn't repented. A good example. Maybe we should pray for ourselves
and others to be forgiven, and, unless we're sinned against, leave
the forgiving to God.
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