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Compiled by Luke Ford

The Right Rush-es Onward

The talk of the '94 election was the Limbaugh-led revolution. Well, in 1996, conservatives are turning up the volume even louder. Where's the opposing view? That's what liberals are asking.

By Judith Michaelson, Los Angeles Times Sunday January 28, 1996

...Afternoons there is Dennis Prager of KABC-AM, attacking what he calls affirmative action "quotas" that California's Democratic Party is using in compiling its delegation to the party's 1996 national convention. It's one of the reasons, he declares, that "I am asking people to vote Republican. . . . So often it is the people who sound so much more tolerant and open [who] will have really destructive ideas for the civilization."

With the coming long march of caucuses, primaries, conventions, campaigns and debates leading to the election finale in November, talk radio is alive with the sound of politics. Actually, like perpetual political campaigns, it never really stopped.

So, with just 281 candidate-shopping days left to decide on the presidency and the control of Congress, what is the state of political talk radio in Southern California?

On KABC-AM (790), KFI-AM (640) and KMPC-AM (710), in prime weekday slots, the regular hosts on issues-oriented programs are all male, a shade more minority than two years ago and preponderantly conservative.

In the tricky arena of political labeling, there's not only Rush Limbaugh conservative but libertarian conservative, neoconservative and an angry conservatism of those espousing a dogma that the best government is that which governs least--if at all. Though the hosts are hardly conservative on every issue or even discuss politics all the time, a rightward tone and emphasis prevails.

KABC's Prager, citing what he considers a liberal tilt to the national press and network TV, dismisses such concerns: "I'll make a trade with liberals," he says. "You give us the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; ABC, NBC and CBS--and we'll give you the talk shows."

In Los Angeles as around the nation, talk radio leans conservative for two reasons: (1) The audience for it is perceived to be conservative, and(2) Limbaugh, whose phenomenal success helped revive the format and spawned a generation of copycats. In 1989, there were 350 news/talk stations; today there are nearly 1,200, and Limbaugh is on 650 of them.

Now the most-conservative title may belong to KABC. Last summer, the station bounced liberal lawyer Gloria Allred from weekday afternoons to weekends, gave the noon-1 p.m. hour of Jackson's show to Prager and replaced Ira Fistell in the 11 p.m.-4 a.m. slot with the more conservative Art Bell.

"In some sense, I think the [point] is not why KABC has gotten conservative but noting that it was really the last to go," says USC law professor Susan Estrich, campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis and a KABC weekend host. "A lot of the energy in politics is on the conservative side, and that's being led by--and in turn reflected in--talk radio. The conventional wisdom right now is that that's where the ratings are."

"The talent's on the conservative side," maintains former KFI weekend host Hugh Hewitt, a conservative commentator on KCET-TV Channel 28's nightly "Life & Times." "Program directors, whether David G. Hall [of KFI] or George Green [general manager of KABC and KMPC], want talent plus interesting subject matter. It may be [that] everything on the left . . . is merely an echo or sounds so throaty. It just gets so old. . . ."

Managers of talk radio stations insist that it is in just this way that political balance is achieved--by callers taking on the host.

"If Dennis Prager or Michael Jackson or Larry Elder, whomever--if they don't allow the opposite viewpoint and the chance to be heard, we go right to their throat," says KABC/KMPC's Green.

Prager says that if he didn't hear from callers that his show changed minds, "I would quit."

'America is tired of all the bull----, of the liberal nature of the government, of the bureaucracy. Americans want to stamp out crime. . . . The death penalty can be a deterrent. . . . Affirmative action programs have worked, but at this point we should be moving away [from them]. . .. It's time for us to balance our budget, to manage our state and federal government like we manage our families."

Rush Limbaugh? Dennis Prager? Xavier Hermosillo? No, that's George Green, general manager of KABC and KMPC, chatting in his office on South La Cienega Boulevard about his own views--and denying that sharing his opinions is a prerequisite to getting hired there.

Regarding the decision of the Stephen S. Wise synagogue to rename its high school after the Milken family:

Radio commentator Dennis Prager, a member of Stephen S. Wise Temple who is an active speaker and writer on Jewish ethical issues, said he saw no problems with the decision.

"If one member of a philanthropic family does wrong, and if that invalidates the family name, then clearly the Kennedy Center, Stanford University and the Carnegie Foundation all should change their names," Prager said.

(LA TIMES 9-95)

GAY RABBI - LA TIMES

One dissenter to the acceptance of gay behavior in Jewish religious life is writer and radio talk-show host Dennis Prager, a conservative Jewish analyst.

"I would have intellectual respect for the [gay] movement to equate homosexual relations with heterosexual relations if that movement took a different position on bisexual behavior--because bisexuals have a choice," Prager said. "That the homosexual movement supports bisexual behavior . . . means that their position is not at all based on the argument that homosexuals have no choice.

"Rather, it is an attempt to undo the 3,000-year-old Jewish battle to make heterosexual, monogamous love the human ideal."

Responding to Prager's remarks, Rabbi Jerry Danzig, executive director of Valley Beth Shalom, said that human makeup is so complex "that I would not be so presumptuous to say even bisexual people are choosing at any one moment."

Goor said the only real issue is this: "Is there potential for holiness, love and committed relationships between two people of the same sex? Clearly, there are attempts in Reform and Conservative Judaism to recognize that they too are created in God's image.

"In Jewish tradition, we live in dialogue in each generation between the ancient text and our lives," Goor said. "The text itself is never a clear, black-and-white statement."

Goor said he is convinced that the majority of Reform rabbis are leaning toward approval of same-sex ceremonies for gay couples, and he has performed such ceremonies as an associate rabbi at Temple Judea.

Those rites have been away from the temple--but only because no one requested them at the synagogue, he said.

"The policy of this synagogue has always been complete freedom for the rabbis to perform whatever ceremonies they choose," he said.

More significant than his rabbinical freedom, however, is providing recognition at life-cycle events, "sacred moments" from birth to death, within one's own religious community, he said.

Los Angeles Times Tuesday October 14, 1997

On June 28,1996 the Los Angeles Times printed this article written by Howard Rosenberg.

The National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts met in Washington last week, reaffirming that anyone with lips can join the club. Not that this is quite headline news. Take Kato Kaelin.

Or take Joycelyn Elders, in some ways admirable, a caring, socially committed physician who fearlessly says her piece. Yet she was also one of the least articulate, most misspoken high-ranking U.S. government officials in history when it came to expressing herself extemporaneously. Someone who self-incinerated as President Clinton's surgeon general in part precisely because she couldn't talk. Someone so incoherent as an off-the-cuff communicator that in her last public forum on behalf of the administration she gave the impression of suggesting that schools give instruction in masturbation in AIDS prevention. What she meant to say, surely, was that schools should mention masturbation as an alternative, which was controversial enough, but hardly as outrageous 'as advocating publicly funded courses in self-pleasuring.

"Words are strange things," she said after the resulting storm had blown her from office. "Once they are out, you can't get them back." Actually, hers zoomed back at her like lethal boomerangs. And after she was forced to resign her post?

Yup, she found work as a radio talk show host, her syndicated program lasting five months before expiring last December from weak interest.

That Elders flopped as liberal counterpoint to the teeming hive of conservative radio talkers was not surprising. That such a verbal klutz would ever merit such a gig, however, was astounding. But listen, "astounding" is what much of talk radio is all about.

Consider, for example, that gathering of radio schmoozers in Washington last week. There were stunning similarities between some of its attendees and topics hashed over at a conference of animal rights activists held simultaneously at the nation's capital. One of the latter's most dramatic moments was the screening of "Almost Human," an award-winning "20/20" segment about biomedical testing on chimpanzees who live out their years confined inside tiny cages.

It's now apparent that the great species barrier may not be so great after all. Like chimps, incredibly, radio talk-show hosts (the brightest of them, at least) can make and use tools. Like chimps, some of these talkers (although exact percentages are unknown) appear capable of rational thought. Like chimps, their behavior is encoded in their genes. And also applying to some radio talkers is what famed researcher Jane Goodall told the World Congress for Animals last week about chimps she studied for years in the African wild: "They have a dark side to their nature."

Yes, there is the small minority of radio hosts (KABC radio's Dennis Prager comes prominently to mind, regardless of whether you share his views) who present ideas rather than banal flaming rhetoric tied to every banner headline. When it comes to qualifying for cages, however, many other radio talkers are, indeed, just the ticket. Heading the list are Howard Stern (when his rollicking free form wit turns ugly)' and twice-suspended, New Jersey talker Paul Kehler, who reportedly has dubbed the anti-abortion rights crowd "a bunch of fat yentas' who are just jealous because they can't get any" and accused a local school board official of earning her job through oral sex.

One radio host with an even greater tendency toward darkness is G. Gordon Liddy, who earned a Freedom of Speech award from the National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts in 1995 after taking heat and getting dropped by a handful of stations for advising his audience how to fatally shoot federal agents in self defense.

Liddy, who spent more than four years in prison for his role in Watergate, was succeeded as the association's Poster Talker this year by a trio of Freedom of Speech awardees, one being fiery Bob Grant, who was bumped from his popular WABC show in New York after making a snide crack about Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's death in a plane crash that capped a history of Grant making comments on the air widely regarded as racist. Radio audiences not always being discriminating, Grant is now a sizzling item on another New York station. What a world. Witless Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott is labeled a bigot, and is ordered by baseball to take a walk. The rabidly loopy Grant is labeled a bigot, and gets an award.

But it gets even goofier. Sharing the Freedom of Speech award with Grant this year is celebrity Harvard law professor/O.J. Simpson defender Alan (Build a Media Soapbox and He Will Come) Dershowitz who, prior to Grant being fired, was bounced from his own WABC radio program after calling Grant a "racist" and "despicable." And get this, the third honoree is none other than Michael Eisner, chairman of the Wait Disney Co., which owns WABC, the station that fired his fellow recipients.

So . . . here's the scorecard in this lst Amendment Disneyland: Grant gets the award for having the courage to be despicably nasty on the air. Dershowitz gets the award for having the courage to blast Grant for being despicably nasty. And Eisner gets the award for heading the company whose station that had the chutzpah to fire both Grant and Dershowitz for exercising free speech. Obviously, the question that ignorant souls frequently ask about sentient animals - Is there really a mind here? - is instead applicable to those handing out the association's Freedom of Speech award. Speaking of animals, meanwhile, the New York Daily News reported that Grant called Eisner a "skunk," and that after the dueling Grant and Dershowitz received their awards separately at the talkers' confab, they shook hands and posed for pictures. It was the civil thing to do, proving that they are, indeed, what many observers suspected they were. Almost human

Dennis Prager on sexual harassment:

Real sexual harassment is evil, but our society has gone overboard.

Why? First, because the primary impulse behind much contemporary feminist legislation is not liberation of women but anger at men--specifically men's sexual nature. Second, too many men are intimidated by feminist demands. Third, liberal politicians want women to think they need them for protection. Sexual double standards used to be against women; they are now against men. At work, she can wear clothing that reveals all she wants, but if he comments on what she reveals, he is liable for a lawsuit. Strong women are also victims of sexual harassment hysteria. No Victorian rules portrayed women as so weak and as so needing special protection as do America's sexual harassment laws. (LA Times)

Forgiveness: A letter to Newsday by Bill Reel

WE'RE SUPPOSED to love people and use things. But sometimes we love things and use people - we sin, in other words - and for that we need forgiveness.

I paraphrase the words of a priest I heard preach an Advent mission.

He was preparing souls for Christmas by urging us to forgive and - through contrition and penance - to be forgiven.

Resentments are fatal to my peace of mind. Unless I forgive those who (I imagine) have trespassed against me, I can't seem to forgive myself.

But then along comes a contrary opinion that forgiveness is too cheap - and that forgiveness granted in the absence of repentance trivializes evil. "The Sin of Forgiveness" - that arresting headline topped a recent Wall Street Journal column by Dennis Prager, a West Coast writer and radio talk show host. Forgiveness has been devalued by Christians who bestow it casually and indiscriminately, he argued.

Prager cited the "We forgive you, Mike" banner that Paducah, Ky., high school students draped on their school after freshman Michael Carneal shot and killed three fellow students and wounded five others.

The students had no right to pardon the perpetrator of this murderous rampage, which only the individual victims could forgive, Prager argued, and for the school community to play God by presuming to bestow forgiveness was blasphemy - and moral grandstanding, too, making it all the more reprehensible.

We're too quick to forgive in our selfish quest to feel good about ourselves, Prager opined. This is the result of a too-liberal culture in which the only mortal sin remaining is not murder or adultery but intolerance. Thou shalt not judge harshly! Hence a minister preaching to a Martha's Vineyard congregation that included President Bill Clinton last summer could piously proclaim the moral duty of Christians to forgive Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 Americans.

"Considering what he did, that may be a formidable task. But it is one that we as Christians are asked to do," the minister sermonized.

Prager begged to differ, maintaining that Christians ought not go around dispensing absolution at least until after mass murderers have said they're sorry. "Though I am a Jew," he wrote, "I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential if America's moral decline is to be reversed, and that despite theological differences, there is indeed a Judeo-Christian value system that has served as the bedrock of American civilization. For those reasons I am appalled by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness."

Theologians and ordinary people alike will differ about forgiveness and qualifications for it. The spiritual value of asking for forgiveness rather than granting it might emerge. A book to be published next year, "When a Pope Asks Forgiveness," reveals that on no fewer than 94 separate occasions during his pontificate, Pope John Paul II has corrected erroneous judgments made by churchmen and acknowledged past wrongs, and on 25 of these occasions the Pope has asked for forgiveness on behalf of the church.

Some cardinals believe the Pope has said mea culpa too much. But, according to author Luigi Accattoli, the Holy Father wants the church to go into the third millennium with a clear conscience.

"Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do," Jesus prayed for those who crucified him. He forgave them even though they hadn't repented. A good example. Maybe we should pray for ourselves and others to be forgiven, and, unless we're sinned against, leave the forgiving to God.