UNITED STATES: Disney Urged to End Racist Radio Show

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 2 1996 (IPS) - A New York group is taking the Disney entertainment conglomerate to task over one of its newest employees: a New York radio host who allegedly believes in white supremacy.

The host, Bob Grant, has for years been the most popular voice on the New York station ‘WABC,’ the flagship station of the ABC radio network.

But, now that Disney has completed its acquisition of ABC’s radio and television assets, the conglomerate also inherits Grant and his often vicious comments.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a New York media watchdog, hopes Grant proves such an embarrassment to the company that has given the world Mickey Mouse that it silences what FAIR says is his blatant racism.

“Disney has in the past responded to activists who have complained about racial stereotypes in their movies,” notes Jim Naureckas, editor of FAIR’s magazine ‘Extra.’

Most recently, Disney dropped parts of the movie ‘Aladdin’ that Arab groups found offensive and sought input from American Indians on its 1995 film ‘Pocahontas.’

“Do they intend for a racist to promote white supremacism over their airwaves?” Naureckas now asks of Disney’s latest acquisition, Bob Grant.

Grant has complained that he is being victimised simply for challenging “politically correct” views on race, religion and other hot-button topics.

But FAIR counters that a sample of Grant’s radio broadcasts show him to be more than a mere bigot.

“I don’t know of any major talk show host who has as openly expressed an ideology of white supremacism as Bob Grant has,” Naureckas says. “It’s not just random offensiveness.”

In one December 1993 broadcast, for example, Grant criticised blacks as “these thugs, the savages, the refugees from the Kalahari,” and said that whites have “evolved too far” by allowing blacks to air their views.

He complained of a caller from Haiti, “Why doesn’t he go back to Haiti, where he belongs?…I’ve never figured out how (Haitians) multiply like that. It’s like maggots on a hot day.”

When one caller told Grant, later in that broadcast, that AIDS has been prevalent in Haiti, the host responded, “It is not prevalent enough; there’s still too many of them.”

Several groups have argued that Grant’s broadcasts have helped spark violence against minority groups.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in a report last year, cited Grant as one of many media figures who spread the false rumour that Muslims were behind the Apr. 19 Oklahoma City bombing.

As U.S. authorities were about to capture white supremacist Timothy McVeigh in connection with that attack on Apr. 20, Grant said, “The indications are that those people who did it are Muslim terrorists.”

When one caller objected that the culprits had not been identified, he responded, “What I’d like to do is put you up against the wall with the rest of them, and mow you down along with them. Execute you with them.”

Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s communications director, says the media broadcasts accusing Muslims of the Oklahoma attack helped prompt a number of attacks nationwide against Muslims. In the days immediately following the blast, CAIR recorded more than 220 incidents of racist attacks, including arson and beatings, one- fifth of them in the New York area.

Julie Hoover, a spokesperson for Capitol Cities-ABC, the Disney- owned company that runs WABC, says that Bob Grant’s show today is a marked improvement from what the critics disparaged.

In 1994, Hoover says, Grant was made to apologise on air for his racist comments, and he has since dropped the worst of his invectives. “He is now more careful,” she says. “If you hear him now, it’s a different show.”

Naureckas concedes that, in recent months, WABC has succeeded in getting Grant to tone down his rhetoric, and the host has dropped some of his more offensive locutions — such as “savages” for some African Americans.

The comment last year about Muslims, explains Hoover, was because “he had misunderstood something a previous caller had said (as defending the bombing)…He used some very intemperate comments, and he was reprimanded.”

Capitol Cities-ABC has no intention of dropping the show, she adds. “He represents a conservative viewpoint, like many talk show hosts…(but) we don’t believe he goes over the edge,” Hoover says.

But FAIR went on the offensive against Grant anew last month, when he allegedly endorsed a white supremacist conference in Kentucky over the airwaves.

Naureckas says that Grant announced the meeting of the conference, the agenda of which is to include discussions on the genetic inferiority of blacks and a call for apartheid policies in the United States.

“To us, it is much more dangerous for someone to be promoting the infrastructure of white supremacism than simply to be making racial comments,” Naureckas contends.

Despite such attitude, he adds, Grant remains popular with conservative politicians. On the day he endorsed the supremacist group, for example, former Republican presidential contender Steve Forbes appeared on the show.

But other officials who used to be Grant’s guests, including New York Governor George Pataki, have stayed away since New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, another Republican, blasted Grant as a racist in 1994 and vowed never to return to his show.

Bob Grant may thus be a little bit more isolated than before. But Disney, which referred all calls to Capitol Cities-ABC, is standing firm, so far, in wanting to hold firm to hold on to show — and its host