³Michael Savage has equated gays with pedophiles and suggested that homosexuality is a conspiracy to reduce the population of white Americans while Asians and Hispanics (who "breed like rabbits") take over the country. According to news reports, Savage (who is Jewish) once played tapes of Adolph Hitler's speeches over German military music the day after Yom Kippur. On the afternoon of Herb Caen's funeral, he played sound effects of him pissing on the columnist's grave....² SF Bay Guardian September 20, 2000 news | a+e | sf life | extra | sfbg.com Radio Rat Poison The dark side of Disney: nasty, vicious hate radio in one of the nation's most tolerant, progressive markets. By Daniel Zoll THE MAGIC WORD for the Walt Disney Company is synergy: The Lion King, produced by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, gets promoted on Radio Disney, airs on Disney's ABC-TV, and gets spun off as a Broadway show (produced by Disney), a theme park attraction (at Disney World), and a line of Disney toys. So as long as Mickey Mouse and Co. are cross-promoting, why not give San Francisco's own Michael Savage a host on Disney-owned "Hot Talk" KSFO-AM his own Disneyland ride? They could call the ride "It's a White World After All." Or kids could take aim at immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at the "Savage Nation Shooting Gallery." The Disney Store chain might sell Savage's commentaries on "turd-world" immigration, or why women shouldn't vote, or the gay rights movement, which he calls the "Pink Swastika." Actually, it's safe to say you won't see any of those things coming to Disneyland anytime soon. The giant media conglomerate works hard to promote and defend its image as a family-friendly entertainment company that makes nice movies, runs clean, safe, fun amusement parks for Mom, Dad, and the kids, and bills itself as "the place to turn for quality family entertainment." But there's another side to Disney, and you can hear it every day in, of all places, San Francisco. Welcome to hate radio, Disney style. In just the past week or so, for example, Michael Savage has equated gays with pedophiles and suggested that homosexuality is a conspiracy to reduce the population of white Americans while Asians and Hispanics (who "breed like rabbits") take over the country. According to news reports, Savage (who is Jewish) once played tapes of Adolph Hitler's speeches over German military music the day after Yom Kippur. On the afternoon of Herb Caen's funeral, he played sound effects of him pissing on the columnist's grave. He even once suggested that some Marin schoolgirls who passed out sandwiches to the homeless in San Francisco were in danger of getting raped but might enjoy it (see Savage Family Values). The Walt Disney Co. referred me to Julie Hoover of ABC Radio, who stressed that she could not speak for the parent company. She said that both Disney and ABC radio "support a diversity of voices." "We recognize that some of the people who speak on some of our stations will be saying things that not everybody agrees with," she said. She added that Disney has a good reputation as an equal opportunity employer who offers domestic partners benefits. Shock-jock schlock Of course, right-wing ranting is a staple of talk radio around the country. And conservatives have as much right to the airwaves as anyone else. But a lot of people in San Francisco and elsewhere around the country are starting to wonder how long Disney can continue to maintain its wholesome image and still push the envelope on shock-jock schlock. A few weeks ago, Disney paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit over a promotion by the morning show team at its KLOS station in Los Angeles. Hosts Mark and Brian had the bright idea of giving out "black hoes" black plastic gardening tools as a gag promotion. Employee Judy Goodwin had sued in August 1999, contending that the promotion was "racist and sexually degrading." After initially refusing to apologize and denying all claims, Disney settled the lawsuit last month. Civil rights groups are reportedly still upset that Disney has taken no action against its executives. As for Mark and Brian, their Disney contracts were recently extended. Some observers think it's only a matter of time before San Francisco's Savage whose real name is Michael Weiner goes too far. "There has been some concern that he would cross the line, get the stations sued, get clients to bail out, get Disney to lower the boom on him," said a KSFO insider who asked not to be named. It is unlikely that the image-conscious company would feel comfortable being associated with the likes of Savage and its other hate jocks. Charles Lyons, who covers Disney's film studios for Variety, says that the company is ultrasensitive about maintaining its wholesome reputation. When Disney's Miramax film division released the controversial Kids in 1995, Lyons recalls, the parent company immediately tried to distance itself from the movie. "Disney tries to be the most responsive and responsible studio as far as creation of entertainment for the entire family; that's why when those sorts of family values are at odds with products like Kids you see the studio going into defensive overdrive." Disney has, indeed, lowered the boom in the past, but it takes quite a profound violation of public taste to make it happen. Bob Grant, a former host on Disney-owned WABC in New York, got the axe after he celebrated former commerce secretary Ron Brown's death in a plane crash. (But Grant had been allowed to stay on the air previously, even after calling blacks "savages" and using his show to promote white supremacists.) Bill Mann, a longtime Bay Area radio columnist who now covers the S.F. market for RadioDigest.com, says that if Disney cared about offending people, it would have pulled the plug on Savage a long time ago. "You have to do something that's pretty radical now to get Disney upset, based on what Savage has done already," Mann said. "As long as you're loud and obnoxious and call attention to yourself, that's what talk radio's all about today. That is the name of the game: to polarize people." The Savage Nation is just one offering in Disney's menu of extremist fare on KSFO-AM, a station Mann (a registered Republican) refers to alternately as "Reichstag Radio," "KKKSFO," and "Sieg Heil on Your Dial." KSFO is the new home of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who became the target of nationwide protests after describing gays as "deviant" and "a biological error" and disapproving of gay marriage, gay parenting, and unmarried couples' living together. San Francisco community activists held a protest last week outside KPIX-TV to protest the station's decision to air Dr. Laura's new television show. Critics say Schlessinger, whose doctorate is in physiology, contributes to a climate of hatred, intolerance, and violence against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. A stampede of advertisers, from Proctor and Gamble to Red Lobster, have pulled their ads off the show. But Disney's KSFO is promoting Dr. Laura as strongly as ever. KSFO also recently picked up Rush Limbaugh, who has toned down his rhetoric in recent years but is still the official hate-radio attack dog of the Republican Party. All about money San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano has been the frequent target of Savage and Disney's other radio characters. "We get a lot of calls from cell phones telling us that we're jerks or queers or whatever, and mostly they emanate from the shock jocks," Ammiano told us. "Disney family values are really making-a-profit values. It's all about money, and it's all about not caring about people's lives and not caring that a lot of this can feed into violence." Say what you will about Savage; at least he was local. When he talked about Ammiano, Willie Brown, and "the pervs and the wackos and the sickos and the wimps in the local press," we knew he was talking about San Francisco. But as of Sept. 21 his local show is going into syndication and will run on 85 to 100 stations across the country. At that point Disney's KSFO will offer only four hours of daily local programming Monday through Friday, hardly enough for it really even to qualify as a local station. Besides Rush, Dr. Laura, and Savage, the KSFO lineup is filled with mostly syndicated hosts offering a wide range of Clinton conspiracies, pro-gun sermons, anti-immigrant rants, and late-night UFO updates. KSFO's president and general manager, Michael Luckoff, who runs all three of Disney's Bay Area stations, said he is in daily contact with Disney executives on programming matters. When asked how the station's programming fits in with the Disney image, he likened it to the company's film offerings. "Much like Disney has several different types of movie companies, they own a variety of radio stations as well," he said. "In the case of Michael Savage I don't necessarily agree with everything he's said, but we monitor our product pretty carefully, and if there are things said that go over our guidelines we take the issues pretty seriously." We called Savage for a response and provided our questions to his producer, Greg Chapin, but he did not respond by press time. When asked if any of the Savage quotes mentioned above "went over" the station's guidelines, Luckoff said that he hadn't heard any of them personally and could not comment but that Savage had been reprimanded in the past. Monopoly mouse Disney has a monopoly on the commercial news-talk format in the Bay Area: it also owns KSFO's main "competition," KGO-AM. As such, does it have a responsibility to balance its "hot talk" offerings? The Mouse's defenders sometimes point to KGO as the counterpoint to its reactionary sister station. KGO is one of the most locally oriented and balanced stations in the national wasteland called commercial talk radio. It's also been the highest-rated Bay Area station for an amazing 22 years in a row. But it would be a stretch to call it liberal. Few, if any, of KGO's local hosts would be comfortable with such a description. Host Gene Burns is a self-described political independent who has joked that the station should be renamed KGORE, for what he sees as a pro-Democrat bias among KGO hosts. Highly rated Ronn Owens, another moderate, has been outspoken in his criticism of progressive Ammiano. KRON news anchor Pete Wilson, the newest addition to the KGO roster, says he tends to "attack any argument that identifies itself with labels, conservative or liberal." Until recently KGO was even the home of Dr. Laura, not exactly a bleeding heart. Is Paul Harvey's syndicated "news" program liberal? On the contrary: he might feel more comfortable on sister station KSFO. According to a report by New York-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Harvey's show "presents a world under attack by welfare recipients, big government and labor." FAIR's Steve Rendall, an expert on hate radio, says the idea that the "drooling, knuckle-dragging right of KSFO" is counterbalanced by KGO is false. "Disney does a great disservice in the Bay Area," he said. "Here you have a centrist station versus a station offering hard right-wing commentary in one of the most liberal areas in the country. There is very little talk from the progressive side of things, and what there is, is ghettoized in the radio graveyard shifts." Luckoff defended Disney's talk offerings in the Bay Area. "KGO is a very balanced radio station, and we felt that there was a further niche in the market for a conservative format, which turned out to be quite correct." KGO's only remotely liberal hosts, Bernie Ward and Ray Taliaferro, are relegated to the late-night and early-morning hours, respectively. Ward is a moderate Democrat who supported NAFTA. Taliaferro, the first major-market black talk-show host in the country and a leading civil rights advocate, is the station's most leftist host. But to the sizable numbers of Bay Area people who find themselves to the left of the Democratic Party these days, Taliaferro isn't much of an ally: he is fully supportive of Al Gore. In at least one instance, one of the station's moderate hosts got pressure from KGO bosses to be more conservative in his reporting. On a recent program Ward mentioned he had "taken heat" from KGO station management for being too hard on Republicans during shows aired on location from the GOP convention in Philadelphia. When we asked him to clarify his on-air comments, Ward told us that station management felt his shows in Philadelphia were too critical and did not provide enough coverage of the substance of the convention. "They felt that we were too partisan," he said. "They felt that there were a lot of people who wanted to know more about the Republican convention, and they didn't get enough of that from me." Meanwhile, KSFO has become a command center for conservative activism in California. Savage turned out about 3,000 people for a rally in 1997 in support of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative. Ron Unz, author of the anti-bilingual education Prop. 227, appears on KSFO so frequently he might as well be added to the daily lineup. Morning-show hosts Melanie Morgan and Lee Rodgers did a service by educating listeners about the hazards of gasoline additive MTBE, and they've turned out thousands for protests on the issue. But it was part of a larger smear campaign against environmental measures like highway carpool lanes and electric cars. Almost without exception, the term environmentalism is synonymous with devil worship on Disney's KSFO. The federal Fairness Doctrine is based on the premise that broadcasters, in exchange for the use of the public's airwaves, should cover issues of public importance and do so fairly. Thanks to the Reagan administration and the broadcasting industry's lobbying clout, the FCC stopped enforcing most applications of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. But the FCC still maintains that broadcasters "have an obligation to serve their local community's needs and interests." It's hard to imagine what local community KSFO is serving, but it's certainly not San Francisco. Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Media Access Project says that broadcasters still have a responsibility to the public to provide coverage of diverse viewpoints and to respond to local needs. "It is undoubtedly the case that broadcasters are still expected to serve the public interest as a condition of their license," Schwartzman said. "Disney is more concerned about drawing listeners with inflammatory programming than they are about the effect of the programming on their communities." I work for a rodent If "black hoes," Savage's antics, and Dr. Laura's homophobia haven't earned the wrath of Disney, what would? Just ask Jim Hightower. ABC Radio used to distribute Hightower's syndicated show, a blend of populism, hard-hitting commentary, and humor. The former Texas agriculture commissioner has long been an advocate for the rights of consumers, children, blue-collar workers, and the environment and a critic of greedy corporate interests. Disney was no exception. "I work for a rodent," he declared after the Disney-ABC merger was announced in 1995. "When you allow that much power in so few hands, they will take money out of real news-digging, and it will become what music radio has become, which is Top 40 hits." Hightower also dissed Disney for employing homeless contract workers who he said had to pay for their uniforms and tools out of their $4.25-an-hour salary while Disney CEO Michael Eisner made $78,000 an hour. Shortly after taking over ABC radio, the company dumped Hightower. ABC radio executives said at the time that there was no connection between Disney's takeover and Hightower's axing. But according to FAIR, staffers at Hightower's office note that ABC stopped promoting the show "almost as soon as the merger was announced." To this day, Disney doesn't syndicate any hosts with a remotely populist or progressive slant. If Disney does ever decide to balance its talk programming, it won't be because of peer pressure. KSFO has been nominated by the National Association of Broadcasters, who meet in San Francisco this week, as the best news-talk station in the country. See also Bad reception by Dan Zoll, November 25, 1998 \
