April 20, 2007
Talk Radio Tries for Humor and a Political Advantage
By JACQUES STEINBERG</p>
<p>Opie and Anthony, a radio show originating in New York that once broadcast the sounds of two people reportedly having sex in St. Patricks Cathedral, did not take long to try to extract some humor from the massacre at Virginia Tech on Monday.</p>
<p>Just after 8:30 a.m. Wednesday the shows two hosts Gregg Hughes (Opie) and Anthony Cumia staged an on-air reading of a play written by the killer, Cho Seung-Hui, and posted on the Internet.</p>
<p>Titled Richard McBeef, the play is a tale of betrayal, murder and child molesting, subjects that the hosts and a supporting ensemble approached with little melodrama. Afterwards, they cheered themselves with cries of Bravo! before being interrupted by the clatter of what sounded like automatic gunfire.</p>
<p>What, too much? a participant could be heard saying, in a broadcast heard in New York on WFNY-FM, which is owned by CBS Radio. </p>
<p>Yeah, little bit, little bit, someone responded. Not enough times gone by. Careful.</p>
<p>Only a week after Don Imus was taken off the air by MSNBC and CBS Radio for making a racially and sexually charged aside about the womens basketball team at Rutgers University, his former colleagues across the spectrum of talk radio have wrestled with how far they can go in sounding off (and even mining for a few laughs) on the violence at Virginia Tech. Some of the most prominent hosts including Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Neal Boortz have shown little restraint.</p>
<p>This, after all, is an incident in which many themes that often serve as grist for those hosts and their callers including immigration (Mr. Cho was Korean), gun control (he appears to have used legally bought handguns) and the aggressive coverage of the news media (NBC initially broadcast the suspects multimedia manifesto) have coalesced.</p>
<p>Speaking on Wednesday on his syndicated program, which is heard on more than 600 stations, Mr. Limbaugh argued that tragedies could be prevented by a law banning political correctness.</p>
<p>This guy was sending up flares, Mr. Limbaugh said of Mr. Cho, whose erratic and disturbing behavior had caught the attention of other students, the campus police, faculty members and others. Was everybody so concerned with the trumped-up global warming scare they didnt notice a real threat, for example?</p>
<p>And how about this? Mr. Limbaugh added. The guy is Korean. Hes Asian. How many people refused to do anything about it or even complain about it because they would be tagged as racists?</p>
<p>Those comments, though, seem mild compared with others this week by Mr. Savage, whose program, originating in San Francisco, is heard on more than 300 radio stations. </p>
<p>Mr. Savage, whose harsh comments about homosexuality resulted in his dismissal from MSNBC in 2003, sneered audibly as he referred to Mr. Cho as a senior in English, drawing out the word for emphasis, and as Comandante Cho. Mr. Cho, who was born in South Korea, moved to the United States with his family in 1992, when he was 8. </p>
<p>This kid was brainwashed over there, Mr. Savage said. Later he added that the only reason Mr. Cho was walking the streets was because liberal scum have for 30 years handcuffed the police and the people of this country and made us hostages in their drama.</p>
<p>At one point, Mr. Savage suggested that Mr. Cho uses the rhetoric of Al Qaeda when he rails against rich kids, debauchery and alcohol as he apparently did in a note found in his dorm room. After taking several calls, however, Mr. Savage began to backpedal from any possible terrorist connection in Virginia.