On the January 12 broadcast of San Francisco radio station KSFO's Morning Show, co-hosts Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan continued to lash out over the controversy surrounding Spocko, a Bay Area-based blogger who last year attempted to spotlight the racist and violent rhetoric common to Morgan and other KSFO hosts. Rodgers referred to “crackpot-leftist-crazed bloggers” and “ass-kicking [sic] suck-ups” whose “opinion is utterly, absolutely meaningless to me.” Moments later, Morgan said that she's “been getting all the Media Matters emails, you know, copies of their reporting on this whole situation.” Later in the program, Rodgers called the Quran “bloodthirsty.”
On the January 11 broadcast of the Morning Show, Morgan announced that KSFO would be pre-empting its regularly scheduled programming on January 12 to air a live special intended to “hit back against those people who are trying to silence us and take away our free speech rights, get us fired, thrown off the air, because they don't like what we have to say.” She explained that she and the other KSFO hosts targeted by Spocko -- Brian Sussman and Morgan's Morning Show co-hosts, Rodgers and Officer Vic -- would host the special program, which she said would last “three hours or however long it takes to answer all the questions.” Morgan invited “the public as well as the media as well as bloggers to participate in this.”
From the January 12 broadcast of KSFO's Morning Show:
RODGERS: About this hog wrestle we're putting on the radio this afternoon, dealing with these crackpot-leftist-crazed bloggers, I believe I am on record many times over on this program as saying frankly I don't give a damn what the political left thinks of me. I would assume if they didn't hate me that I had gone soft and soft in the head, and I don't care one bit more about their ass-kicking suck-ups and what passes for the so called mainstream media in the Bay Area. I don't care what they say, what they write, I just don't care. Their opinion is utterly, absolutely meaningless to me, and I think it's very illustrative that you have media people in this market who hate any expression of thought that is contrary to their own brain-dead liberalism, to such an extent that they will rely on cowardly accusations by cowardly bloggers who hide their own identity to use quotes that have been lifted totally out of context. And as I have said, I'm going to take part in this, this afternoon, but I think addressing these cretins is a little bit like getting into the proverbial peeing contest with a skunk.
But I will be back at noon for what I trust will be one of the great non-events -- but nevertheless perhaps entertaining events -- in radio. So they get their fellow losers to send us hate mail -- what the hell is new about that? We've been getting it for years. We get hate email all the time from left-wing crazies whose vocabulary and imagination are so limited it's mostly along the line of, “Well, you must like homosexual anal sex,” you know, and, described a lot more graphically than that. And all of it suggests to me is that these creeps are really looking in the mirror when they're composing their little misspelled emails, and -- you know while they're sitting in a basement playing with themselves.
But nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus in the old static factory here that we ought to take them on head-on, just rip 'em to shreds, and put a little context around some of these Internet quotes they've been floating around -- anonymously, of course. The coward's ultimate hiding place -- anonymity. And if there are sponsors who listen to these idiots -- and I'm not sure there are despite what they say -- but if that's the case, I know who it would be. It would be some craven little time-buyers at an advertising agency someplace who have no guts whatsoever. But one thing sponsors oughta keep in mind: We have listeners who also spend money. As a matter of fact -- intense, in-depth demographic surveys have shown that the average income and disposable income of the KSFO listener is well above that of the average in the entire Bay Area market as they call it, nine-county Bay Area. And they can decide for themselves where to spend it, and I don't think very many of those people are going to want to spend their money with a bunch of ass-kissers for a handful of crazies who have a keyboard in a basement someplace cranking out their silly, little blogs. If they got any sense, they won't. They'll fire any time buyer who suggests such a thing. Well, anyway, that'll be at noon today.
MORGAN: Yeah, at noon until 3 o'clock this afternoon.
RODGERS: Or until we get sick of it.
MORGAN: Yes. And we will be taking on, we'll open up the phones to anybody, to the bloggers, to the critics. There will be media that will be participating via our computer stream. Anybody who wants to call in is more than welcome to, including the Star Trek nut who started this thing, whose name is Spocko.
RODGERS: Naming yourself after a Star Trek character, that is an indication of the mentality of this dope. But, anyway, we know there will be a concentrated campaign, left-wing crazies will call in and they'll start spewing the filth first thing, and yes we will censor them, because we have an FCC license to think about too. We can't have people coming on the radio saying some of the filth that they put in their emails, so we just hit the red button, and screw 'em, you know, that's they way that's going to work.
OFFICER VIC: Fascinating, Captain.
RODGERS: Yes, yes. God.
MORGAN: I know, but I have to tell you --
RODGERS: Naming yourself after a Star Trek character, talk about somebody living in fantasyland.
OFFICER VIC: Pointy ears, deal in logic, Captain.
MORGAN: I've been getting all of the Media Matters emails, you know, copies of their reporting on this whole situation, and also from the crazed stalker, Mike Stark, who actually did stalk Senator George Allen's (R-VA) campaign, who is doing the coordination of the, quote, “blogswarm” has -- is writing that poor Spocko, poor, poor, poor, Spocko, has been having a difficult time. He's not used to all the media attention.
OFFICER VIC: The crush of the corporate weight coming down on me. [crying noises]
RODGERS: Here's why I question -- did and do question -- the wisdom of us doing this this afternoon. Our audience doesn't get caught up -- they don't read all this crap. They don't trust for damn good reason the so-called mainstream media, the [San Francisco] Chronicle, and the TV stations, and so forth. They tune them out. They assume anything they see, hear, or read in the mainstream media is a flat bleeping lie anyway.
MORGAN: Yes, but it's a different day and age, it's a digital age right now, Lee, and --
RODGERS: But they don't read this stuff. The people who listen to us don't read this crap.
MORGAN: Our people are very involved on the Internet actually.
RODGERS: But they don't read this left-wing drivel stuff, and they assume that if it's on television or in the big papers in the Bay Area, it's probably a bleeping lie, so why bother?
MORGAN: Well, in this case, it is a lie, all of it. And we're going to set the record straight today.
OFFICER VIC: I think it's going to take about 20 minutes.
RODGERS: I think so too.
OFFICER VIC: And then Dr. Laura [Schlessinger] will be back on, and everything will be fine.
[...]
RODGERS: You don't have to go through the whole history of the bloodthirsty Quran; you just look at some of the stuff they've been up to recently in the name of Allah. If you want to read it for yourself, and I strongly recommend it, go to FrontPage magazine on the Web, frontpagemag.com, and under columnist, just click on that and they got a whole list, I think they're alphabetical, anyway its Don Feder, F-E-D-E-R, and read up for yourself what these fun-loving, peace-loving people have been up to lately. And then you decide whether you think I'm going to apologize.
Adam D. Serwer is an intern at Media Matters for America.