KJLL Needs to Cancel Laura Schlessinger and Replace Her with King Daevid MacKenzie
KJLL-AM 1330, here in Tucson, must be demanded by its potential audience to scrap its daily two-hour carriage of the Laura Schlessinger Show and give me, a broadcaster of 40 years’ experience (more than Schlessingers’, may I add) the same program time each weekday.
Every weekday from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. Arizona Time, KJLL currently airs the Los Angeles-based radio program of Laura Schlessinger, a notorious bigot on many issues, historically including sexuality and most recently emphasizing racism.
This bigotry is forced on her audience under the guise of psychological therapy and “tough love” advice. Her syndicator, Talk Radio Networks, unethically promotes her show under the name “Dr. Laura,” and indeed she does hold a doctorate from Columbia University. However, that doctorate is in physiology, the science of the bodies of living things. She only holds a master’s degree in psychology. The medical board in California specifies that, even if one holds a doctorate, only those who hold a clinical license in the field they work in may call themselves “Doctor” in public; why they have not nailed Schlessinger on this fraud (as they did Barbara De Angelis, one of Schlessinger’s former co-workers at Los Angeles station KFI), many are still wondering.
Last week, Schlessinger, whose flagship station is now the CBS-owned KFWB, took a call from an African-American woman who was married to a Caucasian man and was extremely upset with the racially disrespectful comments her husband and his friends made around her. For whatever lack of reason, Schlessinger used this incident to start using the “N-word” on the air (she uttered it no less than eleven times within a couple of minutes of programming time), told the woman that “if [you don’t] have a sense of humor, don’t marry outside of your race,” and stated that many African-Americans “unthinkingly” voted for President Barack Obama simply because of his African racial heritage.
This kind of hardcore bigotry is certainly not surprising to the GLBT communities. Schlessinger has historically uttered vicious statements in relation to us since the mid-‘90s. "A huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys." "If you're gay or lesbian it's a biological error." "When we have the word 'homosexual,' we are clarifying the dysfunction, the deviancy, the reality." "When homosexuals adopt children, these children are intentionally robbed of a necessary mom and dad." All of these are direct quotes from Laura Schlessinger’s mouth and writings.
Curiously, after Schlessinger made these vicious attacks on us, CBS handed her a syndicated daily one-hour television show in 2000. Through the efforts of the legendary entertainer and social activist Robin Tyler and her allies in the StopDrLaura.com website, Schlessinger’s TV show was indeed stopped. Proctor & Gamble, a major advertiser on daytime TV, was the first to publicly drop Schlessinger, leading to no less than 170 other advertiser cancellations across the United States and Canada. United Airlines refused to allow its own in-flight magazine to sell ad space to CBS’ Paramount Television subsidiary to publicise the show. And 30 more advertisers dropped her radio show, costing her an additional $30 million in annual income.
Despite these widespread rejections of her hate speech, over 400 radio stations across the United States, most of which are either owned or otherwise affiliated with the Salem pseudoChristian hate talk radio chain, still give her daily airtime to spew her bigotry today, a decade after her TV show was stopped. She has since “moderated” her stance on homosexuality but continues to oppose marriage equality, establishing that she has not adequately modified her hatred of us.
Schlessinger’s bigotry continues to plague our public airwaves because her distributors over the years – formerly the Clear Channel subsidiary Premiere Radio Networks, currently an outfit calling itself Talk Radio Networks – offer her program to local stations who want to operate on the cheap. The distributor “barters” the program, offering it to a station without cost in exchange for the first one or two commercials in each set of ads aired within and directly adjacent to each hour of the program. Why, the station reasons, should they pay people to operate the program locally when here’s a national show being handed to it on a silver platter with that one little string attached? Any local spots sold are automatically profit as a result.
Consequently, many local stations have absolutely no locally-based programs. They are simply feeder plants for nationally-satellited material produced by people who would never bother setting foot in the station’s community of service, let alone live there – or here.
KJLL, the Tucson affiliate for Schlessinger, largely operates as one such station. Its only daily program host ased here in Tucson is John C. Scott, who, as the station’s Program Director, hands himself those two late afternoon hours (significantly, immediately following Schlessinger’s show on KJLL’s schedule). The remainder of the time is given to national programs offered on barter by syndicators, ranging from the similarly racist Don Imus and Lou Dobbs to the politically progressive Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller (the last of which, incidentally, came out of the closet as a lesbian on last Friday’s program). An additional three or four hours a day are sold by KJLL for $500 an hour (the price had been quoted to me when I inquired about joining the station two years ago) for vanity programs that essentially wind up becoming infomercials for the host’s primary business (realtors, restaurateurs and the like).
KJLL has absolutely no issue-oriented talk programming personnel outside of the schedule territory Scott hands himself.
This policy is all too common across the country. It is designed to prevent local discourse on community matters by experienced program hosts that the stations don’t want to have to pay a salary to.
Unfortunately, I am one such experienced program host. I have been involved in broadcasting in one form or another since I was 9 years old, starting out as a child actor in supermarket commercials. I have been news director and talk programming host in the Chicago radio market; hosted talk programs in Phoenix, Milwaukee and Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and performed many on-air tasks in both radio and television on the regional CKY-TV Network in Manitoba, Wisconsin Public Radio, the “LesBiGay Radio” daily program in Chicago, and various stations across the country with my historical Public Radio series “Echoes of a Century.”
As well, and particularly pertinent to the GLBT communities, I have always been open about my bisexuality, never closeted.
I am also physically disabled, having severe degenerative disc disease and lumbar stenosis. Thus, I currently qualify for SSI-Disability payments as a partially disabled person. However, I still retain all of my skills as a broadcaster.
KJLL’s office phone number is 520-529-5865. Everyone reading this article needs to telephone John C. Scott at KJLL and demand that he cancel his station’s airing of Laura Schlessinger’s program and, as a replacement, give me the same air time to start a daily two-hour talk program that will, for a change, not insult or harass its audience. That is the very least Scott owes Tucson and the online listening audience for KJLL polluting the Southern Arizona airwaves with Schlessinger’s hateful bilge for these many years.
