The Blacksburg station, WFNR, that carries right-wing yeller Neal Boortz is considering dropping the out-of-state talk show host, according to today's Virginia Tech Collegiate Times.
Scott Stevens, the station manager at WFNR, called Boortz "an idiot" and a "hate-monger" and said WFNR would be investigating whether to continue to carry Boortz.
WFNR is a Pulaski, Va., based station, which carried Boortz's offensive comments across the Blacksburg area in the days following the VT tragedy.
Yesterday, as we noted in our diary here, The Roanoke Times wrote about three state delegates - Jim Shuler (Blacksburg), Steve Shannon (Vienna), and Chuck Caputo (Centreville) - who began the call on radio stations in the state to drop Boortz from their lineups (read the Times article here).
Today, news outlets across the Commonwealth (including The Daily Press, The Roanoke Times, ABC 13, and VA Tech's own Collegiate Times) wrote about the Boortz controversy, highlighting the efforts of the three state delegates
Remember Neal Boortz? He's the radio show host from Atlanta, who outrageously suggested on his show that the victims of the VA Tech shootings were somehow to blame for their own deaths, and that their not stopping the killer only showed the "wussification" of America (listen to his comments here, and read our original diary here).
The line being given out by some of these defensive station managers is that Boortz has already apologized. They apparently didn't listen when Boortz was rightly confronted by an offended listener. Boortz simply mocked the caller and the victims, telling the caller, "Bite me!" (listen to the segment here).
Here are the really sick quotes that the supposedly apologetic Boortz (note that he appears to be a classic, draft-dodging Chickenhawk) offered up :
"What a nation of candy asses we've become! I mean not only do [the students] stand there in terror waiting to be executed with out doin' a damn thing to protect themselves except maybe hiding behind a desk?."
And, "These students who were killed had a responsibility to do something to protect their lives and defend themselves and they didn't do it!"
Radio station manager Stevens even said he would ask for Boortz to do a show in the Blacksburg area and explain himself.
I wonder what Boortz will tell the station manager? "Bite me?"
In the meantime, let's call Scott Stevens of WFNR at 540-633-5330 to say he's doing the right thing by considering pulling Boortz.
Boortz said that McKinney, "looks like a ghetto slut" during the March 31 broadcast of his radio program, and later added that he didn't "blame them [Capitol police] for stopping" McKinney during a March 29 incident at the Capitol because she had a "ghetto trash" haircut and "looked like a welfare drag queen [that] was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building."http://mediamatters....
I guess the new rule is you can say anything you want, and then just apologize.
While I have little hope that he will lose his radios elsewhere, he ought to be gone from Blacksburg, pronto.
And keep in mind, before the shootings, what was the national media obsessed with? Don Imus. Why couldn't the same thing have happened with Boortz?
Matusleo
Ut Prosim