ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 23, 1996 TAG: 9604230096
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
WHAT DO you know. Talk radio, it turns out, isn't entirely lacking in standards.
Bob Grant, a popular New York radio talk-show host, was fired last week from WABC-AM after he made an atrocious statement on the air. News reports had started coming in about the crash in Croatia involving Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown's plane. Here's what Grant said:
"My hunch is that he [Brown] is one of the survivors . . . . Maybe it's because, at heart, I'm a pessimist."
Isn't that a hoot?
As members of the press, we'd normally be the last to celebrate anyone's firing over the expression of a political opinion, especially a "politically incorrect" opinion. Indeed, we regard political correctness on the left as a threat to Americans' freedom of expression on par with the threat from censorship on the right.
The spectacle of aggrieved groups demanding, and getting, the heads of broadcasters and other public persons who utter something offensive seems often, to us anyway, an exercise as much of intolerance as of tolerance. Prejudice and other forms of error, we believe, are better overcome not by trying to suppress them, but by subjecting them to open debate. With Jefferson, "we are not afraid . . . to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."
But that doesn't mean there should be no standards, no accountability. Grant had every right to publicly hope for Brown's demise (expressed, it also should be conceded, not seriously but in a poor attempt to amuse). Grant's employers, however, had every right to seek his replacement.
This wasn't a one-time slip. In a grotesque litany chronicled over the years by The New York Times, Grant was quoted as regretting that the HIV virus might take "a long time" to kill Magic Johnson. Grant called former New York City Mayor David Dinkins "a washroom attendant." He said he hoped Haitian immigrants would drown on their way to America. He described blacks as "screaming savages."
Not only did Grant enjoy a huge audience for such repugnant talk. Politicians scrambled for guest appearances. They should be ashamed for lending him respectability.
Grant is off the air now, but plenty of other voices feed the meanness in our public debate. We believe such debate, left free, will eventually prove the haters and race-baiters losers. Maybe it's because, at heart, we're optimists.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 linesby CNB