--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [posted to Romenesko's forum
> <http://poynter.org/forum/?id=letters>]
>
> Why Signorile was bumped from "The Connection"
> 7/2/2003 8:54:43 AM
> Posted By: Jim Romenesko
>
> From MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE:
> Just in case you needed one, here's yet another
> example of the
> fallacy of the so-called liberal media -- and a
> great example, too,
> of what utter wimps many conservative pundits really
> are.
>
> Yesterday, a producer at Boston's NPR-affiliate,
> WBUR, was so eager
> to get in touch with me that she contacted my
> editors at both New
> York Press and Newsday with urgent missives, and
> also sent me e-mail
> via my web site. Writing on behalf of the news
> program The
> Connection, she wanted me to participate on a show
> this morning on
> same-sex marriage. The other guests would be writer
> E.J. Graff and
> National Review's Jonah Goldberg. I was on the air
> myself at the
> time, doing my own daily three-hour radio program,
> and didn't get the
> messages until 4 p.m. I called the relieved producer
> at that time and
> told her I could do it. She said she'd have me go to
> an NPR studio in
> Manhattan, but also inquired if I could do it from
> my studio at
> Sirius Satellite, so definitive was she about having
> me on.
>
> Then I received a phone call back at 6:30: I was
> "off the hook" for
> the show, thank you very much. Turns out
> conservative pundit Goldberg
> would not do the show with me. The producer noted
> that they don't
> usually let a guest "dictate" who the other guests
> are, but that it
> was late and thus hard to find another conservative.
> That sounded
> pretty bogus: finding a conservative pundit to do a
> radio program is
> about as difficult as finding a drag queen at gay
> pride.
>
> And what exactly turned fire-breathing, macho
> Goldberg into a little
> sissy, running away from a homosexual columnist? The
> producer said
> that Goldberg implied to her that we'd had some
> words, though
> Goldberg and I have never spoken nor have we ever
> even exchanged an
> e-mail. He did "admit," she said, that I am a
> "powerful" gay
> columnist (yes, I laughed at that one), but that I'd
> put out
> "misinterpretations" of his work. I guess one of
> those
> "misinterpretations" was when I criticized him in
> New York Press
> after he floated the totally unfounded idea that the
> Washington, DC
> sniper suspects were really gay lovers and then
> gleefully called the
> capture of the suspects a possible "threefer"
> (because they were
> Muslim, African-American and, in the minds of
> Goldberg and his fellow
> right-wing smear artists, possibly homosexual).
>
> The other "misinterpretation" might have been when I
> wrote a column
> in New York Press exposing one of his editors at the
> Washington
> Times, Robert Stacy McCain, as a member of the
> League of the South, a
> racist Southern secessionist group. Goldberg had
> just spent a week
> piously calling on Trent Lott to step down as Senate
> Majority leader
> because of his racially insensitive remarks and now
> he was exposed as
> working for an out and out racist himself. (The
> folks at the American
> Prospect's blog soon called on Goldberg to follow
> his own advice to
> Lott and step down from the Washington Times, but he
> did not -- nor
> did he respond at all.)
>
> So, here you have a perfect example of how liberal
> voices are shut
> out of the so-called liberal media at the behest of
> cowardly
> conservative columnists who spend much of their time
> railing that the
> media favor liberals. Even more curious was when the
> producer of the
> supposedly liberal NPR affiliate told me that
> Goldberg said he didn't
> like my journalism or my "tactics" -- particularly
> around the issue
> of "outing" -- and I replied to her how supremely
> ironic that was
> given that he is the child of Lucianne Goldberg, the
> salacious
> web-maven who helped expose Bill Clinton's sex life
> and whom Jonah
> has defended to the hilt. The producer's response:
> Who is Lucianne
> Goldberg? Yes, more evidence of that well-informed,
> agenda-driven
> liberal media.
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com