Editorials / Public Radio's Anti-Semites / La Boheme
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, A s we contemplate the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw and the 400,000 Polish Jews who over a two-and-a-half-year period were shipped from Warsaw to hideous...
...After all, he is right...
...The First Amendment is against censorship...
...As Los Angeles simmers with racial tension, the programmers at KPFK have been doing their bit for tolerance and harmony by broadcasting tapes of distinguished bigots claiming that the genetic makeup of whites makes them incurably psychopathic and in need of incarceration, psycho-surgery, or—in extreme conditions!—death...
...He urges that local broadcasters and commentators deride such claptrap as Afrikan Mental Awareness Week, rebroadcast tapes of these malign outbursts, and point out their errors...
...Yet here we have a problem...
...Kwakus of this world not martyrs but the butts of ridicule...
...Yes, but does the First Amendment call for government funding of hate...
...And all bring to their spiels a patina of science and learning...
...And so, while we wait for them to catch on, let us take up Gold's solution...
...The thesis that Jewish doctors have been injecting black infants with AIDS has been aired by a Mr...
...I think not...
...Thirty years ago in Los Angeles a chorus would have sounded against hate on the radio...
...Leonard Jeffries's irregular hypotheses, for instance, that Jews, not Arabs, ran the African slave trade...
...Jeffries menaces intellect at City College of New York...
...The important point is that our government is subsidizing these dispensers of hate and stupidity...
...Genuine liberalism is pretty much dead in the Republic...
...The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gamely subsidizes such orifices of hate as KPFK-FM in Los Angeles...
...Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, A s we contemplate the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw and the 400,000 Polish Jews who over a two-and-a-half-year period were shipped from Warsaw to hideous deaths in the Treblinka concentration camp, let us pause to note that our government funds anti-Semitism right here in America...
...According to the Corporation's chairman Sheila Tate, there is nothing that can be done about it...
...Steve Cokely, as have Dr...
...Nat Hentoff, one of the Republic's most tireless defenders of free expression and of tolerance, would approach KPFK's hate programming differently...
...Kwaku Person-Lynn indulges callers lauding Adolf Hitler and abominating American democracy...
...Most broadcasters and commentators do not have the boldness of mind and the liveliness of conscience that stimulate Nat Hentoff...
...There was a day when such dopefetcherssimply worked the neighborhoods on foot or from a soapbox in the park...
...Some teach at heretofore respectable universities Dr...
...He believes that it is the duty of intelligent minds to criticize stupidity and hate...
...But now with the spread of "higher education" and the appalling lowering of university standards many of these charlatans have advanced degrees...
...Let us make of the Dr...
...And the charlatans' dupes are not defined solely by the color of their skin...
...The First Amendment protects hate...
...The Board has rejected that proposal, though Gold continues to champion it...
...Other speakers have defamed Asians, Hispanics, and homosexuals...
...He draws a distinction between "censorship," which expurgates or changes programming and obviously runs afoul of the First Amendment...
...I share his libertarian instinct...
...He has submitted a proposal to the Board that reaffirms broadcasters' right to free expression but denies them federal funding for "repeated programming" that "defames any race, religion or minority...
...Now, of course, Dr...
...Today that city's commentators go on about their comfortable business of sharing platitudes...
...Only one member of the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Victor Gold, the writer, is alive to the problem...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...They do not recognize hate language when it issues from those who hitherto were the victims of hate...
...Government sponsorship is quite another thing...
...Person-Lynn is most likely just another of the hundreds—perhaps thousands—of charlatans who regularly prey on the ignorance of the poor illiterates of our inner cities...
...Doubtless there are multitudes of whites and Asians who tune in to KPFK daily to ruminate upon the arcane knowledge of the various "doctors" and "professors" howling there...
...Most of this stuff has been aired on a show called "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend," whose producer/host Dr...
...Hentoff opposes any attempt by government to affect program content...
...and "sponsorship" of programming, which is beyond the purview of the First Amendment...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
