Michael Savage Banned in the UK and the
Implications for Alternative Medicine
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
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Michael Savage |
(May 15, 2009) Last September I wrote a story about radio talk show host Michael Savage. The news peg was an attack on Savage that had just aired on Bill Moyers’ weekly PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. The Moyers show report, “Rage on the Radio,” claimed that conservatives, who dominate American talk radio, were regularly broadcasting speech that was hateful. The program implied that there was a link between right wing talk radio shows and the recent murder of two people at a liberal church in Tennessee. Savage was depicted as the poster boy for the raging radio talkers. According to Moyers, books by Savage and other conservative authors were found in the shooter’s apartment. The implication, if not outright allegation, of the Moyers show report was that Savage’s rhetoric had all but inspired the Tennessee shooter to commit his deadly criminal acts.
As I pointed out, the relevance at the time to people interested in alternative and complementary alternative medicine included the fact that Savage, prior to the start of his radio career in 1994, using his birth name Michael Weiner and a Ph.D. earned at U. C. Berkeley, was a prolific author of about twenty books on herbal and nutritional medicine and homeopathy over the previous two decades. He was, in fact, a well known personality in the alternative medicine field, one of the pioneers of popularizing the new natural medicine paradigm that began to gain momentum in the 1970s.
Another relevance in my mind was this fact: It seemed to me that the modus operandi of the Moyers report, an attack (if, at first glance, a subtle one) on protected free speech, was remarkably similar to an evolving momentum toward politically correct speech and censorship in the American medical community – not only censorship of the medical community itself but censoring and intimidating journalists and writers who cover medical topics – that I had previously reported on.
A prime example of this phenomenon occurred in 2006, when pressure was being brought to bear to manipulate or control media reporting on the subject of HIV/AIDS in the media. At the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August, 2006, leading AIDS experts and, incredibly, representatives of the mainstream media (including The Wall Street Journal), participated in a public forum, HIV Science and Responsible Journalism,where the theme was that journalists who stray from the official party line and report on challenges to the dominant HIV-AIDS research and treatment paradigm should be censored.
The roots of this dangerous attitude can be traced as far back as the year 2000. In an article in Newsday on March 29th of that year, Laurie Garrett quoted prominent AIDS researcher and policy maker Mark Wainberg, M.D. who said that HIV/AIDS “dissidents” (as they are called) are “contributing to the spread of HIV” by promoting mass denial about the disease. Wainberg, according to Garrett, suggested that the actions of HIV/AIDS dissenters warranted criminal prosecution.
By 2006, Garrett had left journalism and become the Senior Fellow for Global Health at the influential Council on Foreign Relations. In that role, she chaired the August 2006 AIDS Conference panel on censorship (pardon me, I mean “responsible journalism”). At that forum, John Moore, Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University said:
“Anyone persuaded not to take antiretrovirals and use instead alternative medicines — lemon and garlic, potatoes and whatever — is also dying unnecessarily. Anyone persuaded not to be screened for HIV status and deprived of the chance of treatment or counseling dies unnecessarily. . . [About people who challenge the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Moore said] It’s sort of like a Hitler/Stalin pact. . . Science and health journalists should talk to the editorial desk and letters editors and vice versa to ensure that AIDS denialist letters are spotted on arrival and spiked, not published.”
Another speaker, Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said:
“One can compare AIDS denialism to denialism on global warming, denialism on evolution and natural selection and denialism on the Jewish holocaust, which thankfully the last of these is almost never seen in the newspapers anymore. But these are all scourges. . . But what I want to ask, and what I want to propose, is should we be having a new ethic in journalism? Is it really the role of the media to challenge scientific consensus? Is it really the role of the media to say well the scientific consensus is wrong — the scientists have got it wrong? . . It’s not the role of journalists to be challenging the scientific consensus. . . Should we be seeing articles in the general media that challenge science? And in my view it isn’t the role of journalists to do that.”
A viewer of the online video of this event commented:
“If you can bear accessing the record of this incredible and truly nauseating event, which unabashedly advocates various forms of intimidation and outright censorship of dissenting opinions, you may agree with me that previous comparisons here and elsewhere of what's going on today with AIDS, Inc. and Nazi Germany (or other past and present examples of violent fascism-statism-authoritarianism) are not too far off the mark. As this Toronto panel proves, the book burners are coming – actually, sadly, they are already here and firmly ensconced. The enormous record generated by the entire Toronto 2006 AIDS Conference only adds to that perception as well as to one's concern about the future.”
Robin Scovill's award-winning 2004 documentary The Other Side of AIDS includes an interview with Wainberg in which Wainberg expresses his opinion on people who take a dissident point of view re: HIV-AIDS. From the film's transcript:
MARK WAINBERG: As far as I'm concerned. . . those who attempt to dispel the notion that HIV is the cause of AIDS are perpetrators of death. And I would very much for one like to see the Constitution of the United States and similar countries have some means in place that we can charge people who are responsible for endangering public health with charges of endangerment and bring them up on trial. I think that people like Peter Duesberg belong in jail. . . Someone who would perpetrate the notion that HIV is not the cause of AIDS is perhaps motivated by sentiments of pure evil, that such a person may perhaps really want millions of people in Africa and elsewhere to become infected by this virus and go on to die of it. And, who knows, maybe there's a hidden agenda behind the thoughts of a madman. Maybe all psychopaths everywhere have ways of getting their views across that are sometimes camouflaged in subterfuge. But I suggest to you that Peter Duesberg is probably the closest thing we have in this world to a scientific psychopath.ROBIN SCOVILL: There are a lot of other scientists that raise the challenges that he raises.
MARK WAINBERG: And now the interview is finished.
More recently, when Thabo Mbeki was forced to quit as President of South Africa, after a decade of being attacked for his views on HIV/AIDS, partisans of the conventional HIV-AIDS mass testing/drug treatment “war” meme started demanding that Mbeki and his supposedly HIV-denying colleagues in his government be investigated and potentially prosecuted by a “truth commission” for not following the international party line on HIV-AIDS (consisting of testing for HIV and treatment with chemotherapy or ARV – anti-retroviral – drugs).
The UK Travel Ban of Michael Savage as Thought Control Censorship
Now, back to Michael Savage and fast forward to the present: It’s eight months since the Bill Moyers TV program targeting Savage aired on PBS. This month, May 2009, Michael Savage is in the news again, catapulted to a new level of controversial notoriety, this time on an international level. On May 5, 2009, the Drudge Report broke the news in the U.S. that Savage had been put on an official list of people banned from entering the United Kingdom.
The so-called “least wanted list” of foreign undesirables who are now prevented from traveling to the UK is maintained by the British government’s Home Office, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security. “Since 2005,” the BBC noted in reporting on the list, “the UK has been able to ban people who promote hatred, terrorist violence or serious criminal activity.”
On May 5, the Home Office published the list, contained in the document “Home Office name promoters of hate excluded from the United Kingdom,” on its official Web site. The sixteenth and last name on the list was “Michael Alan Weiner (also known as Michael Savage).” The Home Office described Savage as a “controversial daily radio host" who is "considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”
According to the Home Office, “Individuals banned from the United Kingdom for stirring-up hatred have been named and shamed for the first time, the Home Secretary announced today. The list covers people excluded from the United Kingdom for fostering extremism or hatred between October 2008 and March 2009. It follows the Home Secretary's introduction of new measures against such individuals last year, including creating a presumption in favour of exclusion in respect of all those who have engaged in spreading hate.” For some of those named, including Savage, “presumption in favour of exclusion” appears to mean that the British government is taking preemptive and protective action against people with no known history of inciting or committing violence or criminal acts – in other words, against the possibility of offensive speech or a “thought crime” occurring on British soil.
The list also includes the names of some convicted criminals including murderers. CNN noted that “Russian skinheads Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky are also on the list. The Home Office says they are ‘leaders of a violent gang that beat migrants and posted films of their attacks on the Internet.’ Samir al Quntar, a Lebanese man who spent three decades in prison for killing four Israeli soldiers and a 4-year-old girl in 1979, is also on the list.”
Savage Responds
Never one to shrink from a challenge, especially one as potentially outrageous and damaging as this one, Savage devoted his entire nationally syndicated radio program on Tuesday, May 5 (it airs live M-F from 6 to 9 PM EDT) to defending himself from the allegations and threatening legal action for libel against the UK’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, if his name was not immediately removed from the list.
Smith had already achieved a considerable degree of notoriety in Britain, among other things for putting into place, and then apparently lying about in an attempt to cover it up, a centralized government system to electronically monitor and spy on everyone and virtually everything anyone does in the UK, including on the Internet, via telephone (landline and cellular), and otherwise. For some recent, and mind boggling, mainstream reporting on this topic, see “Jacqui Smith’s secret plan to carry on snooping” (The Times, May 3, 2009), “Jacqui’s secret plan to ‘Master the Internet’” (The Register, May 3, 2009), and “My farewell to MPs: defend liberty” (The Times, October 26, 2008).
Back in the United States, according to independent audience ratings, Savage is the third most popular radio talk show host with eight million listeners a week on close to 400 terrestrial radio stations coast to coast. As a political author, four of his non-fiction books having made it to the New York Times bestseller list in recent years.
Savage’s career as a radio talker is noteworthy for its success and novelty. He began in talk radio in 1994 at age 52, as noted earlier, after earning a Ph.D. at the University of California and spending several decades writing books on nutritional and herbal medicine under his birth name, Michael Weiner. Adopting the name “Michael Savage,” he emerged as a conservative political analyst – and, in an extremely competitive, market-driven field, he became one of the most successful talk show hosts in the history of the medium. His flaunting of political correctness and his trademark in-your-face style earned him ratings success locally (ironically, in liberal San Francisco) and later on around the U.S. when his daily talk show, “The Savage Nation,” went into national syndication in 1999. Early on, he targeted “borders, language, and culture” as core issues, and was a harbinger of the emerging problem of illegal immigration.
While Savage (as he himself has noted) is generally considered persona non grata and is typically ignored by the mainstream media, there is also little love lost between Savage and many notable conservatives (former CBS News correspondent and conservative author Bernard Goldberg put Savage at #61 on his list of “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America”). Despite Savage’s being a kind of “non person” in conventional quarters, the potential ramifications of the banned-in-the-UK story were inescapable and ensured that it would eventually be widely covered. The larger context includes growing fears about indications that the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress are setting the stage domestically to regulate and restrict political content on talk radio (dominated by conservative hosts), and possibly the Internet, as well (see “Doctrine Air Democracy”).
Savage has had a pack of influential adversaries nipping at his heels for years. The George Soros-funded group Media Matters has singled out Savage and attacks him on a regular basis. Critics have mounted boycotts of his show’s advertisers. Savage also has his reliable defenders, including the Web sites Free Republic and World Net Daily, which quickly jumped to his defense in the UK banning case.
On September 12, 2008, Bill Moyers’ weekly PBS program, also as noted above, helped to lay the foundation for the latest UK-based demonization of Savage by implying in its highly inaccurate and one-sided report, “Rage on the Radio,” that the work of conservative American talk show hosts – Savage in particular – may have inspired the fatal shooting last year of two people at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN. (Books by Savage and other conservative writers were found in the shooter’s apartment, according to Moyers. But interestingly, when the shooter, Jim David Adkisson, pleaded guilty to the crime in February 2009, he said that he wanted to kill all 100 people on Bernard Goldberg’s list – a list that, as noted above, includes Michael Savage.)
On September 15, 2008, I reported on Moyers’ PBS hit piece on Savage in an article here. Eight months later, the British government seemed to be basing its decision to ban Savage on a similar, and similarly undocumented and flawed, theory, as it described Savage as “Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts.” The possibility exists that the British government was at least partly inspired by the Moyers report.
During the second hour of his radio program on May 6, in between listener calls, Savage, who insisted that he had no plans to travel to the UK and hadn’t set foot there in twenty-five years, said:
“I have never advocated violence. . . I’ve been on the air for fifteen years, three hours a day, five days a week – fifteen years. They [Savage’s critics] take a few sound bites that amount to one, two, or three minutes and they try to redefine me by extracting sound bites out of context. I could do that with anyone in the public eye. I could take anybody and edit what they say and turn them into what they are not. You can do it with anyone on the planet. And that’s what has been done to me.“And now, for the English people to permit their government of Lilliputians to take a talk show host and put him in the same category as murderers who are in prison in Russia, as Hamas operatives who have been released from prison after serving ten years for having smashed in the head of a four year old Jewish child after killing her parents, it says something terrible about Jacqui Smith, not about Michael Savage. And I will straighten the record out. That’s all I’m telling you – I’m standing up for myself. You should be proud of me and you should support me. That’s all there is to it. OK?”
As he described the possibility of bringing a libel suit in the UK, Savage said,
“I have incurred some very severe damages already which are likely to become viral very soon. For example, I lead a rather elusive and reclusive life. But as of right now, I have 24 hour security. This is a direct result of this incident.”
The Curious Role of Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers, whose work, it now seems fair to say, may have played a role in the banning and attempted censorship of Michael Savage in the UK, has played a major role in the co-optation of alternative medicine in the U.S. and its reemergence as the less threatening, Establishment-friendly “CAM.”
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Bill Moyers meets the press The White House 1965 |
Moyers served in the 1960s as a top White House aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Moyers’ questionable activities when he was in LBJ’s White House inner circle seem incongruent with his later incarnation as a civil liberties-loving, iconic, near-mythical figure of the American left.
Moyers, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1967-’74 and presumably still a member (he’s also a member of the secret Bilderberger Group), produced a six-hour series for PBS that aired in prime time in early 1993, Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers and a companion book with the same title. The TV series and the book (which promoted complementary/integrated, as opposed to alternative, medicine) were part of a number of simultaneous events, including the publication of Harvard M.D. David Eisenberg’s study on the surprising economic impact of alternative medicine in the New England Journal of Medicine (“Unconventional Medicine in the United States -- Prevalence, Costs, and Patterns of Use,” published January 28, 1993) and the emergence of the new Office of Alternative Medicine at the NIH. (Eisenberg was a key figure in the Moyers series.) Interestingly, at the same time, the mainstream print media for the first time in its history was also hyping the new credibility of complementary alternative medicine (see, for example, the New York Times article published on January 10, 1993).
The unprecedented avalanche of high level hype relating to complementary alt med in 1993 corresponded with (in reality, it helped to accelerate) the diminishing of real alternative medicine, and the establishment of its more palatable successor Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM) as a recognized medical sub-specialty. CAM was much preferred over true alternative medicine by the mainstream (big government, Big Pharma, and the other big players) because it could be integrated into the mainstream allopathic medical paradigm without challenging the political and economic hegemony of conventional medicine.
At the time (the early 1990s), most alternative medicine proponents, after years and in many cases decades of fighting the Establishment, were thrilled that the Establishment now seemed to be opening the door to what they had to offer. A number of alt med leaders were easily co-opted, bought off by invitations to sit on government panels and NIH grants to fund their research. Soon, they began singing from the same playbook as their new bureaucratic masters.
Meanwhile, the true pioneers of the mid-twentieth century wave who had brought alternative medicine to the forefront, from the grassroots up, were winding down or dying off. Names like Linus Pauling, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Dean Burk, and Mildred Nelson come to mind. Instead of being taught and inspired by these original pioneers, the new generation of CAM proponents and practitioners was being propagandized by a new cadre of self-styled leaders, government bureaucrats, herd-like academics, and licensed practitioners of natural medicine like official naturopaths, whose primary allegiance increasingly seemed to be to allopathic medicine. In the view of these players, many of them M.D.-wannabes, there was suddenly the possibility that some natural medicine-light therapies could be integrated into conventional medical practice as “complementary” adjuncts. In the process, the (one time) alternative medicine clinicians, now rechristened “CAM” or “Integrative Medicine” practitioners, could enjoy a new level of credibility and success.
An unfortunate result of this sell-out was that, almost overnight, alternative medicine as a primary, even curative, therapeutic option went out of fashion and over the next decade it virtually disappeared from the clinical scene.
And Now?
Since this is a story in progress, a number of things remain unresolved at this time. It remains to be seen how the story, stories, or intersecting threads of stories described here, will ultimately play out – for example, will Michael Savage’s early promises of a libel suit ever make it to a British court? Also, as some surmise, is the targeting of Savage attributable to President Obama or his administration, and does it presage a wave of similar future media censorship actions here in the United States?
Most importantly, now that the left is in control, will the emerging, potentially epic, battles over free speech, political correctness, and thought control result in people like Michael Savage disappearing from the airwaves?
And finally, how will all of these developments further impact the future of natural healing?
Addenda
In recent months, Michael Savage has rekindled an awareness of his earlier alternative medicine career by referring more often to his past experience in challenging medical orthodoxy. (Within the past year, for example, he reprinted a new edition of his 1994 book, Healing Children Naturally, and offered it for sale on his program and Web site. He has said that its clinical recommendations, the result of the work of several hundred pioneers of natural medicine, have been covered up in the past decade by the actions of the conventional medical industry.) Savage has also spoken out frequently against President Obama’s and the Democrats’ plans to expand the federal government’s role in health care, a topic that is reaching a fever pitch this year. A regular contributor to his show, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, M.D., a staunch critic of conventional psychiatry, has offered commentaries lambasting universal health care.
Acknowledging his role in unconventional medicine, Catherine Bennett wrote a tongue in cheek column about Savage in The Observer on May 10, 2009, “Yes Jacqui, let's keep out those dangerous homeopaths – When the Home Office bans people, we should at least know why. Surely it can't have been for views on autism?” (Savage wrote a book on homeopathy and last year he was critical of conventional diagnoses and treatment of autism.)
One wonders if Savage’s escalating critiques of orthodox medicine, and his earlier decades-long history in this area, have further put him in the crosshairs of America’s conventional political, media, and medical elite. After all, there is nothing more powerful than “Medicine, Inc.,” the biggest business in America (over $2.2 trillion a year) – and challenging it, as Savage has done consistently, is rarely to the long term benefit of one’s career.
Peter Barry Chowka is a writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media.
Portions of this article first appeared at American Thinker.
