Jimmy_Dean said:
and we can take a whole week off
Less than 24 hours after WSPD’s Scott Sloan was suspended for remarks about assassinating the Rev. Jesse Jackson, WVKS colleague Denny Schaffer was on the air offending local black leaders and making Jewish jokes.
In the space of two hours yesterday, Mr. Schaffer defended inviting a prominent black leader in Toledo to eat ribs with him at Denny’s and played a song making fun of Hanukkah.
“Different people get offended by different things,” he said on the air.
Even with Mr. Sloan suspended without pay for a week, Mr. Schaffer showed no sign of altering his outrageous style.
“Everyone in talk radio is aware of what happened (in Toledo to Scott Sloan),” said Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, a national radio trade publication. “But that’s not shock radio. That’s stupid execution of shock radio.”
Analysts and academics agree that WSPD’s and WVKS’s brand of “shock radio” has been a remarkable success around the country, despite the controversies that always seem to accompany it - in fact, perhaps because of the controversies.
It’s almost a rule in shock radio today: Talk show hosts seek out controversy through outrageous comments, and usually end up profiting from it in one way or another.
Radio stations love the added listeners controversy can bring. And the radio personalities themselves, even if they are disciplined by their employers, often get better jobs in the end.
“It’s good for business, and that seems to be the real trend,” said Dr. Diana Owen, a political science professor at Georgetown University. “It’s not about whether you believe in an issue. It’s how far you can push the envelope.”
The latest radio controversy began on Nov. 17, when Mr. Sloan spoke out against Mr. Jackson for his role in the Decatur, Ill., standoff over six boys expelled from a high school there for fighting.
Mr. Sloan said that Mr. Jackson wanted to become a martyr like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and said he wanted to help Mr. Jackson in his cause. He called a hotel with a similar name to the motel where Dr. King was killed, asked about its balconies, and said that once hotel arrangements were made, “All we need now is a shooter.”
Community groups responded angrily, saying that the remarks were hateful and racist.
On Sunday, Clear Channel Communications, which owns WSPD, WVKS, and three other Toledo stations, announced that Mr. Sloan was being suspended without pay for one week as a result of his comments.
The decision received national attention yesterday, with stories published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today, along with daily newspapers in Atlanta, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Dayton.
“These are people who don’t have writers, who don’t have time to research, who don’t really think about what they are saying. It was clearly a stupid thing to say,” Mr. Harrison said.
It wasn’t the first time that a radio personality has reached the national spotlight for comments others consider racist or off-color. It’s common for shock jocks to be suspended or fired. And it’s common for them to go right back on the air - often with better jobs.
In New York, WABC radio fired Bob Grant in 1996 after he said he was “a pessimist” for believing that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had survived a plane crash. Secretary Brown, who was black, died in the crash; Mr. Grant had attracted attention for calling blacks “savages.”
Within days, Mr. Grant was hired by rival WOR, and his show became syndicated nationwide.
In Nashville, disc jockey John Ziegler was fired in 1997 after he used a racial epithet to describe boxer Mike Tyson. He went on to be hired by Philadelphia station WWDB.
The most recent high profile shock jock to be fired was Doug “Greaseman” Tracht. Washington’s WARW fired him in February after he played a record by hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill and remarked, “No wonder people drag them behind trucks,” a reference to the murder of a black man in Texas. Three white men were convicted, two receiving the death penalty and one receiving life in prison
Mr. Tracht had drawn fire in 1986 while working at another Washington station. He was talking about the national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and said: “Kill four more and we can take a whole week off.” That remark sparked protests and bomb threats to the station.
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