Moyers PBS Show Targets Talk Radio and Advocates Preventive Censorship – Are There Implications for Alternative Medicine?
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
|
|
| Michael Savage back in the day when he was an expert and author on nutritional, botanical, and ethno medicine. |
(September 15, 2008) This article may seem a bit off topic in a space that usually reports on news related to natural health and national medical policy. In reality, it has at least two major relevancies to the field.
First, one of the key subjects is Michael Savage. For the first 25 years of his career, Savage, using his birth name Michael A. Weiner, was widely known in alternative medicine circles as a field researcher and the author of over a dozen books on herbal and alternative medicine. Adding authority and credibility to his writings, he earned two M.S. degrees and a Ph.D., the latter from the University of California at Berkeley, in fields related to his writings on botanical and natural medicine.
In 1994, at age 52, Weiner undertook a completely new career: Adopting the name “Michael Savage,” he became a conservative political talk show host – and, in an extremely competitive, market-driven field, one of the most successful talk show hosts in the history of the medium. His take-no-prisoners style, and his core philosophy of supporting traditional “borders, language, and culture” of the United States, 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.
As an aside, and, I think, a significant one, Savage and I have discussed and agreed on the significant and positive influence of conservative and Libertarian philosophy and thought on alternative medicine, especially during its germinative period in the 1960s and ‘70s. Back then, Americans who believed in independence, self-reliance, and freedom of choice and distrusted big government served as a core group in the burgeoning alt med field. Unfortunately, this important part of the history of alternative medicine has been largely revised, and like so much of recent history relegated to the memory hole, in light of the takeover of alt med by proponents of the new integrative medicine model that favors mainstream Establishment academia, government, allopathy, pharmaceuticals – and, most distressingly, leftist socialist-inspired “universal health care.”
The second relevancy involves this point: It appears to be the implication of the PBS television report on talk radio that conservative talk show hosts might need to be held responsible for, or somehow censored and restrained because of, the actions of deranged people who might listen to them, or read their work if they are writers, like Savage, and act violently.
This ominous trend towards criminalizing speech (labeling politically incorrect talk “hate speech”) and advocating preventive censorship reminds me of the serious and extremely alarming discussion that occurred two years ago at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto. At a high profile panel held there (“HIV Science and Responsible Journalism”), with influential panelists and guests in attendance, it was seriously suggested that people, including journalists, who question the party line on HIV-AIDS (including the policy that everyone on the planet should be tested for HIV-AIDS antibodies and given toxic antiretroviral drugs if he or she tests “positive”) might need to be held criminally responsible for the deaths of people who they allegedly influenced (to avoid taking antiretroviral medications)!
And now to the substance of this report. In Bill Moyers Journal, his weekly prime time television program broadcast nationally on PBS on September 12, 2008, left wing icon Bill Moyers targeted talk radio – and not for the first time. But this time, the first one-third of the hour long program featured an in-depth report, “Rage on the Radio – What happens when America's airwaves fill with hate?” The report focused exclusively on conservative, right of center talk radio.
The report began with a review of a fatal shooting last July in Knoxville, TN, when an unemployed truck driver allegedly entered a Unitarian Universalist Church and began shooting, killing two and wounding six before he was subdued and arrested. According to the Moyers program, the perpetrator told the police that he hated liberals and identified the church as a suitable target. Searching the shooter’s apartment, police reportedly found conservative books, including one by Michael Savage. The Moyers show then went on to focus on Savage.
 |
| Savage in a recent photo as a successful national talk show host |
Today, Savage is the third most listened to talk radio host in the United States (behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity), heard on 400 stations with an audience of 8 million listeners. He has also written four non-fiction political books that have become New York Times best sellers. In recent years, Savage (who, unlike Limbaugh and Hannity, is not a card carrying Republican – Savage often criticizes the Republican Party including President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain) has become a magnet for critics on the political left.
The Moyers show on September 12, which mentioned several other conservative hosts in less detail, appeared to suggest that conservatives’ including Savage’s work may have inspired the Knoxville church shooter.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE [of the Knoxille church]: People were killed in my sanctuary of my church which should be the holy place, a safe place. People were injured. A man came in here totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?
RICK KARR [Moyers show reporter]: Buice admits that no one knows for sure and says that [the shooter] alone, is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in [the shooter’s] apartment, books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in [the] apartment was Michael Savage's “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.” In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;” “an enemy more dangerous than Hitler;” “traitors” who are “dangerous to your survival” and who “should be placed in a straightjacket”. . . Savage accuses liberals of “[tying] the hands of our military.”
A number of sound clips from Savage’s radio program, sensational ones clearly taken out of context, were then played on the Moyers show. None of them advocated violence. Other clips by conservative hosts Glenn Beck and Michael Reagan did mention “shooting” and “killing.”
Adding an international spin, Reverend Buice, in what seems like a completely irrelevant and ridiculous reference, even suggested that talk radio might inspire genocide.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio [in Rwanda] was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide.
The talk radio segment on Bill Moyers Journal went on for about twenty minutes, adding up to more than 3,000 words. The PBS transcript of the entire show is here. The remainder of the program was mostly a skeptical and highly critical analysis of Gov. Sarah Palin’s selection as Sen. McCain’s running mate.
Completely absent from the Moyers show talk radio report was any reporting on left wing talk radio show hosts’ frequent advocacy of violence – a phenomenon that Michelle Malkin has termed “assassination chic.”
Pulitzer-Prize winning left-of-center journalist Michael Goodwin detailed some of these violent left wing radio diatribes in his column in the New York Daily News on May 12, 2004, “Liberal radio is airing bad jokes and worse taste.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “ought to be tortured.” President Bush should be taken out and shot.
Those are a few nutso nuggets from the hosts of Air America Radio, which calls itself the new liberal voice. . .
Rock bottom came when. . . Randi Rhodes, the queen of venom. . . compared Bush and his family to the Corleones in the “Godfather” saga. “Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and phuw,” she said, imitating the sound of gunfire.
On April 27, 2005, WorldNet Daily reported “Federal officials are reportedly reviewing a skit [by Randi Rhodes] broadcast on the liberal Air America network that featured an apparent gunshot warning to President Bush.”
Moyers did not see fit to mention any of this in his talk radio-hate report.
Contacted for comment on the Moyers program and his being featured so prominently in it, Michael Savage had this to say:
We live in a democracy where people are free to speak their mind. If the pimp for [President Jimmy] Carter’s anti-Semitism and socialism criticized me so be it. I did not watch it because he is a has-been without any following. Let others decide if they want censorship to control free-speech. Note which side of the aisle wants to stop conservative talk: Nancy Pelosi, Moyers and that gang. What do they have to hide?
Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media. Between 1992 and 1994, he was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health.