Earlier this month Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced on CNN that she was hanging up her headphones at the end of the year. If she could not exercise her freedom of speech, she said, she was not interested in the job.
Watchdogs on the left had pounced on a conversation she had with a black woman in which she proclaimed something that everyone with cable TV knows is true. The N-word is acceptable vernacular for black comedians on HBO, but it's not something you can ever, ever say if you're not black.
While making this point, Dr. Laura purposely said the N-word repeatedly, and that was all the left needed to start contacting sponsors, suggesting they shouldn't want their products associated with this viciously racist talk show. It didn't matter that even liberal editorialists in The Washington Post declared that there was nothing at all racist in what the doctor said.
The left had found its chance to silence her, and it pounced. All it needed to do was distort the context completely, and it did so masterfully.
Leftists say outrageous things on the radio routinely, things they truly mean, too, and those remarks never see the light of day on ABC, CBS and NBC. Talking about the N-word is wrong, but wishing death on political enemies is OK when the rhetorical bombs are dropped on conservatives.
The Media Research Center has a new report chronicling who the real radio hatemongers are. Start with Ed Schultz, perpetually out of control on MSNBC.
On the radio Aug. 11, 2009, Schultz spewed: "Sometimes I think they want Obama to get shot. I do. I think that there are conservative broadcasters in this country who would love to see Obama taken out."
This might be what they call projection coming from Schultz, since he begged for Dick Cheney to die. "Lord, take him to the promised land," he proclaimed on May 11, 2009.
Or take Montel Williams, the former TV talk-show host who had a brief tenure on Air America radio before it imploded. On July 21, 2009, he explained what conservatives had planned for uninsured Americans: "When they show up at the emergency room, just shoot 'em! Kill them! ... Do we have enough body bags⢠I don't know."
Reporters scream in protest over anyone calling President Obama a socialist but they don't find anything scandalous in vicious lies like these.
Randi Rhodes aired a February 2008 radio skit where she bizarrely imagined the Mitt Romney campaign saying it would go on a shooting rampage and commit mass suicide if John McCain won the GOP nomination. She had one Republican claim: "As a true Republican, I'm prepared to poison my own children if John McCain is the nominee."
Left-wing radio hosts even blame their conservative counterparts for 9/11. Broadcaster Mike Malloy shouted at his opponents on Jan. 19, 2010: "Do you not understand that the people you hold up as heroes bombed your (expletive) country⢠Do you not understand that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are as complicit of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack as any one of the dumb-ass 15 who came from Saudi Arabia?"
Has any conservative ever said anything remotely similar to thisâ¢
Malloy also claimed on April 19, 2010, that Beck and Limbaugh rejoiced over the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995: "This is what Beck and Limbaugh and the rest of these right-wing freaks want to see happen again. And again. And again. Endlessly." Perhaps Malloy is granted an exception because he sounds clinically insane. He has claimed Rep. Michele Bachmann "would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death camps." He has claimed Cheney "must have feasted on a Jewish baby, or a Muslim baby."
Then consider this: Malloy was a news writer for CNN for years. Schultz was awarded a platform on MSNBC for his hatred. Those supposed guardians of civility in our liberal media are not bowing their heads in embarrassment. They are nodding their heads in agreement.
L. Brent Bozell III is president of the Media Research Center.
