The Times doesn’t get into details. Here they are:
Now, let’s note a few things here. First of all, Randi Rhodes is a pig - that seems to be her stock in trade and what her employers demand of her. They didn’t seem too upset in the past when she said that Bush would be happy that people died in the wake of Katrina so long as they were poor and Democrats. They didn’t punish her for playing gunshots on the air as an implied threat against Bush should he screw around with Social Security.
And yet her employers seem upset here over comments that weren’t even aired - they were only spoken at an event.
Her employers can deal with her as they see fit, but if anyone can defend this suspension on other than political grounds, I’d love to hear it. Personally I think she should have been off the air long ago, but it seems funny to me that this will only happen at Air America when she attacks a Clinton or Geraldine Ferraro.
I’ve heard very little of her show and don’t really listen to Air America at all, but radio is about ratings and alienating an audience is bad for business. The stuff you quoted about Bush doesn’t really sound offensive to me (it’s certainly not a 10th as offensive as anything you’d hear from Limbaugh or Klannity or Billo on any random day. You righties can dish it out but you sure can’t take it), but calling Hillary a “whore” is biting the hand that feeds you. It’s not a political decision, it’s a business decision. If Rush had siad it, nothing would happen because his audience and his advertizers would be fine with it.
Thought: How the hell can anyone stand to listen to Randi Rhodes? Rush makes me want to scream at the radio, but Randi makes me want to throw the radio out the window.
It is a political business decision. She can scream all she wants at conservatives, but she better not piss off even one liberal. She works in political radio, and what she said should have been off limits, insofar as her ‘character’ is concerned.
Randi Rhodes is offensive to the standards of decent broadcasting, I know because Ann Coulter told me on Hannity and Colmes.
OK, she purports to be an entertainer, who has to hold an audience, and that was pretty crass. I can’t stand her, personally, even if she agrees with me about some stuff. So I am all for suspending her over the comments, or not doing so. Whatever. I mean, imagine if someone called a presidential candidate a “fag” at a non-broadcast event- they would never be on television ever again.
Also, I don’t think that even Rush could escape ire for calling Geraldine Ferraro a “whore”. The only thing that protects Rhodes even slightly is her status as a woman.
Also in re: the “whore” thing, I don’t agree with what Ferraro said, but I think she’s saying what she believes, and oddly I feel the same way about Hillary. Hillary really really thinks that we’re all over the edge on this Obama thing, and she’s going to have to wag her finger and tell us all that she told us so in a year.
The same would be true for right wing radio too, though. If Michael Medved started calling Bush a chimp, he’d get fired. Right wing audiences are extremely thin-skinned and humorless.
I for one am pleased that Mr. Moto listens to, and is concerned about Randi Rhodes so much that he wants her to receive consistent treatment.
I for one do not listen to her. I heard a small bit of her show once, after streaming Al Franken, and wasn’t particularly interested in listening to her further. I also don’t listen to Air America anymore, but that’s a separate thing.
If they want to suspend her, that’s up to them. I know the concept of holding a radio host to some standard of decency must be foreign to listeners of right-wing radio, which may have prompted the present OP.
As a bit of an academic exercise, I wonder if the OP can recall any comments of the OP that are more equivalent to what she is being suspended for here, because the two he listed do not fill the bill of double standards as suggested by the thread title.
By the way, Mr. Moto, what’s the latest news on Ward Churchill? Also, have you stumbled over anything as you search deep in the diaries at DailyKos that we should be made aware of?
Apropos of very little, I feel compelled to mention that I always felt Rhodes was the Michael Savage of Air America. There, I said it.
-FrL-
and Dan Savage is the Laura Schlesinger of kinky sex. No seriously, if Schlesinger was a gay male kinky sex advice columnist, she’d have exactly the style of Dan Savage. They’re fundamentally the same, abstracted from, you know, the dirty words and whatnot.
It’s foreign to radio in general. It certainly has been foreign in the past for Rhodes. Her network didn’t even bat an eye after she was mugged and her and another host tried to blame it on right-wingers. Turns out she can’t remember the incident at all, much less who did the thing. She’s now saying she just fell.
And yet this is the thing that gets her suspended?
I think that you may be getting a little too exercised about this other previous stuff that she has done. She fell while probably drunk and another host blamed it on “right-wingers”?
And then you say “yet this is the thing that gets her suspended”, as if calling two of the more famous women in her party “fucking whores” was somehow no big deal?
If you dislike Hillary so much that a broadcaster calling her a “fucking whore” fails to register with you as at least equally inappropriate to those other things, you may want to bow out of analysis of this situation.
It seems that she was fired as a buisness decision, based on a political remark.
As mentioned by others, she has made some disparaging remarks about the right wingers before. That is what Air America offers to it’s listeners (advertised as a counter point to right leaning talk radio, I presume). That is the demographic that her sponsers are aiming for.
But then she turned on “one of their own” (HRC), and the sponsers may have notified her bosses at Air America of their displeasure.
It’s funny to me that right-wingers like to poke liberals with the failure of Air America. The fact of its relative failure seems like a testament to liberal intelligence. We don’t like radio demagogues as much as the right does–that’s a bad thing?
I don’t have enough data for a full analysis, but it strikes me that Randi Rhodes is not the wingiest wingnut on Air America, and if she can be suspended, what chances have the rest of them got?
I stopped listening when Al Franken ran off to make a run for the senate, but as I recall the lineup something like this.
Al Franken was informative and fun.
Rachel Maddow was lively and informative.
Sam Seeder was the straight man for the seething cauldron of hate Jeneane Garafalo.
Randi Rhodes had a sense of humor, but relied a lot on repetition with escalating rhetoric and volume. The listener generally did not become better informed about anything, but maybe got some catharsis and felt dirty about it afterward.
Everybody else was a shrill piping lu-lu in a tin foil hat who had to squeegee off the microphone during station identification breaks.
I mean, I’m glad Air America does consider some things out of bounds, but this can only have a shrilling effect on everyone else’s rhetoric.
This exactly right. The reason Air America is not successful is because liberals like to think for themselves. They don’t need to be comforted by hearing constant reiteration of their own viewpoints.
Right wing radio also bases a lot of its material on scapegoating minorities and the powerless – homosexuals, blacks, women, Mexican immigrants, the poor, the homeless. It’s all about making losers feel better about themselves. Since liberals don’t need to do that, there’s little that left wing radio can offer them.
Assuming arguendo that Air America failed for the reason you speculate, the fact is that it’s still a poor business decision – that is, if the backers and organizers for Air America were so savvy, why did they commit financial resource towards a product that was doomed to fail by offering the ultra-intelligent liberals only demagogery which they would inevitably reject?
I live in a town that’s about 90% lefty, and what you wrote here has to be one of the funniest things I ever read. All they DO in my town is sit around and talk about how right they are, congratulate each other, and look at you very strangely if you disagree.