Jello Biafra Responds To Michael Savage Flap

PUDDIN' HEAD POLITICS

Jello Biafra Favors Talk Radio Censorship







After struggling for years against censorship of his work, one might expect an aging punk rocker to have a particular respect for free expression by others. And as a supposed "anarchist", advocating governmental intervention to suppress free speech would seem out of the question.

For former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, however, hypocrisy apparently knows no boundaries.

Biafra is once again in the news after syndicated talk host Michael Savage played "California Über Alles" soon after news of Ted Kennedy's cancer broke, resulting in an angry response from left-wing Internet sites.

Savage maintains Kennedy's cancer shouldn't preclude talk radio hosts and others from criticizing Ted's dubious legacy, which includes killing Mary Jo Kopechne with his car and a host of far-left positions on issues.


That led the bottom- dwellers at the Boston Phoenix, a weekly freebie, to question Biafra about Savage's move to play his circa-1970s song. Right off the bat, Jello sinks himself by admitting he hadn't heard the show, but commented on it anyway.

Far worse, he blamed Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity for the "problem" (even though they have absolutely no connection to this story) and showed support for the former Fairness Doctrine, which would have the effect of shutting down modern talk radio (some obscene language slightly edited):

I haven't read the details yet, but I'm aware of what Michael Savage did. Obviously he took my song way the hell out of context and did it deliberately. But the bigger issue is Savage himself and how the hell he gets away with stuff like saying this, and saying that people with AIDS should be put in concentration camps. And then when people protest at the station, he calls on his own listeners to come down and beat them up.

It scares the s--t out of me that the most popular radio talk-show hosts are all foaming-at-the-mouth, ultra- bigoted blabbermongers whom only North Korea or the Nazis could love.

But like it or not, Savage is the third-most popular radio-talk show host in this country behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Nobody from the other side is represented or promoted well enough by the big right-wing-owned radio networks to compete. That's one of the ways they mindf--k the country into being so dumb they vote for people like George Bush, Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The real issue here is why aren't the big candidates calling for media reform? Once upon a time there was a law on the books called the Fairness Doctrine, and it said that if somebody like Savage or Limbaugh or that skull woman Ann Coulter said something completely f--ked up and dishonest on the air, somebody else was allowed to come on the air and reply to them without being told to shut up every 15 seconds by a power clown like Bill O'Reilly. That law was on the books for 50 years but was allowed to expire in the late '80s when a Democratic-controlled congress failed to override President Reagan's veto of the law.

The damage was further compounded when your friend and mine Bill Clinton rammed through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, further deregulating how many radio stations and media outlets one corporation can own and what they can do with them and they greenlighted their long-held agenda to throw public interest out the window. And the volume and impact of the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Savages multiplied exponentially with nobody on the other side being allowed to reply.

In large areas of rural and small town America, this is the only radio anyone is exposed to. That's the problem. We need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. John Kerry had a golden opportunity to fire back at the Swift Boat liars and use that as a platform to rally the public to demand media reform. But true to form, he was too chickens--t to do it.

There you have it- Biafra supports using the government to suppress opinions other than his own and actually decries past efforts to get the FCC out of the content- control business.

In addition, he ignores the tens of millions of dollars that have been invested in Air America Radio and other liberal talk radio networks, including the fact that Clear Channel added leftist programming to dozens of its stations. But that effort largely failed because listeners tuned out.

When your Radio Equalizer was a Seattle- based host, liberal talkers in the building would sometimes invite their grunge rock heroes to the show as guests, only to find they were dumber than a box of rocks.

With his incredibly hypocritical statements, Jello Biafra has proven he's also little more than a puddin'- headed has- been.


FOR New England regional talk radio updates, see our other site. NEW THERE: Kennedy media coverage scrutinized


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