NYT pg1: Shock radio "remains as...insidiously untamed in the days after Imus’s collapse as before"

[DeepModem Mom]

Shock Radio Plays Rough and Shrugs at Imus’s Fall
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: May 6, 2007

Almost two weeks after CBS Radio fired Don Imus for his racially and sexually demeaning remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Nick Di Paolo opened his talk show on another CBS station in New York by mocking a manual that, he said, one of his bosses had given him that morning.

The booklet was entitled “Words Hurt and Harm” and, as described by Mr. Di Paolo, it urged him and his brethren to avoid the sort of stereotypes that had not only upended Mr. Imus but had also just gotten two colleagues on WFNY (92.3 FM) suspended for broadcasting a six-minute prank call littered with slurs to a Chinese restaurant.

“Right away, we’re starting with a false premise,” Mr. Di Paolo told his listeners on April 25, just after noon. “Because words don’t hurt.”

He then proceeded to refer to someone in the studio who was apparently of Colombian descent as “a drug dealer,” before using an exercise in the manual as a springboard to the following observations: that “enough” Native Americans drank to make them fair game for a joke; that waiters in Chinese restaurants were “efficient” and “better than most, you know, other ethnic groups as waiters and waitresses”; and that Jewish mothers were “bad cooks and a little hairy.”

The part of the radio spectrum where Mr. Di Paolo holds forth each day — shows in which commentary and entertainment fuse, sometimes under the rubric of a morning or afternoon “zoo” — remains as arguably and insidiously untamed in the days after Mr. Imus’s collapse as it was before, based on a New York Times screening of nearly 250 hours of shock-talk radio broadcast over the last week.

Gay men and lesbians, and women and Muslims, among others, were frequent targets of ridicule; coarse, sexually explicit banter, particularly descriptions of anal and oral sex, proliferated, much of it reminiscent of the routines that once drew Howard Stern heavy penalties; and meanness appeared to be a job prerequisite, whether a host was belittling someone who called in or the unwitting subject of a prank call....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/business/media/06talk.html?ref=todayspaper

[MnFats]

1. Sigh....gotta stick to NPR and Air America, I guess.

the rest of the dial is contaminated.....I wish they'd nailed Michael Savage a bit in that NYT piece. He's just intolerable...and he doesn't believe half of what he says, I think....his ONLY purpose is to cause outrage, so he can get noticed and move past the Hewitt-Medved-Reagan world of second-string talkers and move up to hannity and limbaugh's realm.

[Iris]

2. yes, caught a bit of his show on the way home last week. aid Dems. trying to bring back fairness

doctrine were trying to declare Limbaugh, Hannity, and him "enemies of the state." Isn't that what they were saying about the Dixie Chicks and others a few years back?

Really despicable.