Outrage at the outrageous in our little town

Our
president continued to thumb his nose at the world, his attorney general
continued to flex his muscles, and Kodak unleashed another round of bad news.
But the really big story in Rochester this past week was Bob Lonsberry.

            Being outrageous is nothing new for Lonsberry. He and WHAM, which has been airing his program,
thrive on it. But I doubt either of them anticipated the reaction to Lonsberry’s comments about an orangutan and a monkey
running for county executive.

            Clearly, Lonsberry
was referring to Mayor Bill Johnson, whom he seems to despise. Lonsberry has insisted that he didn’t mean the comments to
be racist. Maybe he’s naïve and didn’t know that references to black men as
apes and monkeys have been common racial slurs for years. You’d think somebody
at WHAM knew, though.

            WHAM fired Lonsberry
on Monday, and so he’s off the air until another station picks him up. (And
there must be some out there who are positively drooling at the prospect of
inheriting his ratings.) But the events leading up to that firing are
instructive.

            The station’s initial response was
to suspend Lonsberry for two days. After the NAACP
and local religious and political leaders protested, Lonsberry
and WHAM got a bit more contrite. WHAM released a statement saying its
management “finds Bob Lonsberry’s on-air comments
unacceptable and uninformed.” And the station released a statement by Lonsberry, apologizing for his “shameful comments” and
saying he was beginning “diversity training.”

            But those statements did not come
until 5 p.m. Thursday,
September 25. Lonsberry’s first primate slur took place
in late August, the second on September 18. The stuff had started hitting the
fan the weekend of September 20, when the Democrat
and Chronicle first reported Lonsberry’s remarks.
(In a bizarre bit of news management, rather than handling the story as news,
the D&C buried it on its insipid
Saturday Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down column.)

The racial
slurs are every
bit as egregious as Lonsberry’s critics have said.
They are also dangerous, feeding the racial tension,
fear, and hostility that simmers just below the surface in Rochester. It is not
being “politically correct,” as some Lonsberry fans
have insisted, to protest Lonsberry’s language.

            But it’s not enough to focus solely
on the racism. And it’s not enough to focus solely on Lonsberry.
This is not about free speech. It’s about civility. It’s about responsibility: Lonsberry’s and WHAM’s.

            Bob Lonsberry
is a complicated human being. He is a devout Mormon. He hosts a show on a Salt Lake
City radio station. His website includes links to the Mormon
Church. The times I’ve talked with him personally, he has been quiet,
exceedingly polite, humble. He’s not a Southerner, but
he says “yes, ma’am” the way well-brought-up young Southerners do when they
address older adults. I believe he’s sincere when he says it.

            But for years, he has been spewing
vitriol, in print and on the radio. And when one media company gets weary of
fielding the public outrage, he moves on to another.

            Like many talk-show hosts, Lonsberry specializes in exaggeration, and in pandering to
fear and prejudice. In a recent column on his web page, he lashed out at Jack
Elliott, a public defender who is running for City Court judge.

            “Public defenders are the worst
lawyers,” Lonsberry wrote. “There might be some good
ones, but have you ever met one? … Aren’t the public defender’s clients
usually guilty? … what kind of message is it when a guy who’s spent a decade
trying to get guilty people off announces he wants to be a judge? Who knows how
many people this guy has represented in court who have
later gone out and committed more crimes against the people of Rochester.”

            That kind of loose, inflammatory
talk draws listeners. And big ratings. And advertiser dollars. And
increasingly, that’s the only thing that matters to big media.

In his web
column on Monday — written, apparently, before he was fired — Lonsberry
was lashing out again at the mayor, at local religious leaders, and,
incredibly, at the leaders of the Republican Party. The column is emotional,
scathing, full of hate and incitement to action.

            It’s tempting to view Lonsberry as an exception in this presumably progressive,
tolerant community. But if you want to see the depth of the division in this
community, go to Lonsberry’s website:
www.boblonsberry.com. Read the e-mails he’s receiving from his fans: letter
after letter after letter urging him not to back down, telling him that he
voices their own fears and worries.

            In its press release on Monday,
Clear Channel said that it is “adamantly opposed to comments and suggestions
that would divide or damage our community.”

            “Although Mr. Lonsberry
expressed a willingness to change,” said the statement, “it became obvious to
us that he is not embracing diversity or the beliefs of the station.”

            It should have been obvious long
before now.

Subbing
for Bob

And
speaking of damage and division: It is no small matter — to me, at least —
that some prominent local Republicans have guest-hosted Lonsberry’s
show. Among them: County Executive Jack Doyle, exec candidate Maggie Brooks, DA
candidate Ann Marie Taddeo, and that Man Who’s Everywhere,
Bill Nojay.

            I don’t see how you can host a show
like Lonsberry’s if you don’t condone the kind of
stuff he has been spewing out.

Bush
league

Kodak’s
news last week left me as depressed as I’ve been in a while. Sure, we’ve all known
that the layoffs would keep coming. And for years there’s been the threat that
the company might someday have little presence here. But the announcement of
Kodak’s new direction brought the threat closer. Maybe we’ll be able to
persuade the company to do its digital work here. But maybe not. (And ink-jet
printing as a path to a brighter Kodak future? Good grief!)

            The Kodak news did take my mind off
the pain of President Bush’s speech to the UN, though. The Bush administration
has led us down a horrifyingly dangerous path, and there seems no way back. KofiAnnan, grieving over the
deaths of UN staff members in Baghdad, warned of
the consequences of the US policy of
unilateral, pre-emptive action. And he reminded the world that terrorism isn’t
the only threat to world peace and security. Others, he said, include “the
persistence of extreme poverty, the disparity of income between and within
societies… the spread of infectious diseases… climate change and environmental
degradation.”

            Annan
urged UN members to prove that the world’s concerns, including terrorism, can
be “addressed effectively through collective actions.” “We have come to a fork
in the road,” he said. “This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself,
when the United Nations was Founded….”

            Terrorism isn’t the only threat to
the US, either.
President Bush and his extremist advisors, however, seem determined to fight
only terrorism (and anything they can pull in under a “terrorism” umbrella. And
they seemed determined to insure, through the insanity of their tax cuts, that
the US is able to
finance only that fight, and only in nations of their choosing.

This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2003.