THE SUNDAY TIMES: As one US shock jock is banned from Britain, Giles Hattersley* asks why millions love to listen to the ranterati
Last week Jacqui Smith forgot the first rule of dealing with shock jocks: never take the bait. On Tuesday the home secretary unveiled 16 names from a list of 22 undesirables the government has recently banned from entering the UK: Ku Klux Klan members, Russian skinheads, religious extremists . . . and Michael Savage, a 67-year-old American radio presenter with a dog called Teddy who can bark the tune of Jingle Bells.
Now, Savage (born Michael Alan Weiner) isn’t some lonely nutcase with a ham radio ranting about Hitler, but America’s third most popular chat show host with 8.5m weekly listeners. Think of an American Nicky Campbell — with a gun, a temper and some highly contentious views on immigration.
Take this gem from The Savage Nation, his nationally syndicated show, last summer: “The illness du jour is autism,” Savage fumed. “You know what autism is? In 99% of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot’.”
Or this on Muslims: “I said, ‘So kill 100m of them, then there would be 900m of them.’ What is it gonna take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you’re gonna have to make that choice sooner rather than later.”
Savage has also said the victims of the 2004 tsunami deserved it for harbouring terrorists, that children’s minds are “being raped by the homosexual mafia” and that a caller who mocked his teeth “should only get Aids and die, you pig”.
These soundbites were enough for Smith to label him as “someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country”.
And then . . . what? Did she imagine that would be that? If so, she didn’t know her man. In full spit-fleck mode, Savage took to the airwaves later that day to call the home secretary a “witch” and a “lunatic”, adding if she didn’t remove him from the list he would sue for defamation. Since he hasn’t committed any crime, he might have a case. >>> Giles Hattersley* | Sunday, May 10, 2009
*The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the writer of the article, Giles Hattersley. They are his opinions, and his alone.
