When talk radio goes horribly wrong (WRVA)

[underpants]

This has to do with the complete moron that the big talk radio station in Richmond WRVA has on in the afternoon (between Rush and Hannity) and the Taylor Behl murder trial of Ben Fawley.

See the wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Behl


The day before (Wednesday) the host had a caller who is supposedly a friend of his and knows the "word on the street" from his work as a cab driver. The entire discussion focused on Taylor Behl's supposed sexual escapades and how horrible a mother Janet Pelasara was. The caller claimed that the plea deal was the work of Taylor's mother so that details of Taylor's life wouldn't come to light in a full hearing. The "cab driver" (surely a means for Watson to throw things on the air without actually taking responsibility for them) went into very sordid detail about the murder victim’s lifestyle:

Multiple partners on the day that she died
11 sexual partners in the week preceding her death (implied here is that she deserved it-that she was BAD)
Her lack of underwear (a sign of bad parenting?)
Her Myspace page (the relevance of that was never made clear)
That she "wanted to meet a criminal" and "wanted to commit a crime" (???)
and so on.

Caller after caller came on to rail against Ms. Pelasara mostly for not breaking down in public to the extent that they wanted to see. I don't know but I get the idea that the "single mother" aspect of this weighs heavily with the WRVA crowd as might the fact that Taylor at least claims on her Myspace page to have grown up in *gasp* Europe. I don't know but this is WRVA so their politics is well established. Almost every caller used "slut" repeatedly. Not once did Mac Watson even ask them to temper their language. It was really offensive even to my jaded ears. The callers ranged from what sounded like the target audience of an angry white male to a middle age woman. It was relentless.

A reporter from the local ABC affiliate came on Thursday afternoon-Fawley agreed to a plea deal and got 30 years but didn't show the remorse he should have according to the radio host. She had covered the story from day one and had actually talked to Fawley yesterday morning to see if he would do an on camera interview. Fawley declined saying that the media had convicted him of what he claimed was an accident and twisted every thing he had said. The reporter very calmly dismissed all of the "conventional wisdom" in this case in a very professional and mature manner. I have to admit that I had bought into much of it. I need to be more cynical I guess. The reporter stated not only the facts of this case but also the explanation of how it came to be-the police apparently bled these stories from Fawley into the news media at least that is what I took from it. Fawley was the police's first source in this case and apparently Fawley set out from the beginning to make Taylor not too much of a victim. The reporter Joanna Massee said that all of the speculation about Taylor arose from Fawley himself and her mother was just as distraught as anyone would normally expect a parent to be. Oh the underwear thing? Well that came from the fact that they found her body without any underwear on it-Fawley probably took it.

I called WRVA while this was on the air to see if Mac would apologize for the prior day's activity. Mac's producer was ready with "he never said 'slut'" line as if they had been waiting for it. He said that the revelations about the facts of the case and about the demeanor (is it really any of our business?) of Janet Pelasara was news to them, basically they had just had their whole line of conversation pulled out from underneath of them.

The next two segments (after the traffic break and a commercial break) no longer featured the reporter only this Mac Watson clown screaming into the microphone "I NEVER SAID SLUT" "IT WAS A CALLER THAT SAID THAT NOT ME!!!" I have to guess that they got more than one call about this.

This is the reason I tuned into this show. The complete uninformed derivative* pro forma ramblings of this guy show what RW talk radio is in it's nature all about. Too funny.

* I say derivative because he actually once started a topic of discussion based on something he heard on talk radio but couldn't remember from whom he heard it. I could cite other examples.