amphichon

[Editor’s note: I’m a little behind on this story, but better late than never.]

Here’s a hypothetical situation for your consideration.

Let’s say a given media outlet is saying a lot of inflammatory things – hate speech, threats of violence, racial slurs, etc. Some folks are offended by this, so they make a note of the advertisers who support the programming and contact them about it. “Here’s what your representatives are saying,” they tell the advertisers. “They’re giving people inflammatory garbage, and then moving right on to promoting YOUR product. Is that what you want?” To back this up, the concerned folks share links to samples of the exact behavior they’re talking about with the advertisers. These companies review the clips and say, “Hm, you’re right – we don’t want to be associated with this, thanks for letting us know,” and they pull their advertising.

So far so good, right? No one’s free speech was curtailed. People are free to say ridiculous things in the media, but other people are free to comment on those ridiculous things, and advertisers are of course free to choose what kind of programming they want to sponsor. Each group is well within their rights here.

What happens next, though, is not so good: lawyers are called out, and in a flurry of cease and desist letters, one of these groups is forcibly silenced. It’s not the inflammatory media folks, or the advertisers – it’s the citizen watchdog who brought the content of the media to the attention of the advertisers.

That doesn’t seem right, does it? But that’s exactly what happened. And you might be surprised by at least one of the players.

The advertisers are big names – Visa, Mastercard, AT&T, Chevrolet and others. (It seems that Visa’s pullout is what led to the unleashing of the legal attack dogs.) The concerned citizen is a blogger who goes by Spocko, of Spockosbrain. And the folks who love to talk about killing and torturing people on the air are at KSFO Radio, in the SF Bay area. And KSFO happens to be an affiliate of none other than ABC, which is in turn owned by Disney, friend to families and children everywhere.

It seems that KSFO is home of a talk show manned by a handful of right-wing nutjobs – Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, and Brian Sussman in particular – who love to say stuff like this:

• Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation… You keep screwing around with stuff like this, we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you.

There’s much more – grab the ZIP file with 30 clips, and a text file with some contact info for the relevant folks at KSFO, here.

Spocko was offended, as many folks were, but of course being offended about right-wing idiots on the air is pretty common these days. (Personally, I agree that a lot of this is pretty offensive, but I realize that liberals do say and do some pretty stupid things themselves at times, and I also realize that if you’re a right-wing radio show, offending half your audience is a good way to raise your ratings with the other half, so, meh.) Spocko realized though that there was a good chance that folks like Chevrolet and AT&T were not aware of what was being said on the program that they were sponsoring, so he made a number of MP3 clips of the show and put them online. He then started contacting those advertisers to share the clips, and that’s when the advertisers started to pull out, and shortly thereafter Disney called out the lawyers.

It’s interesting that Disney doesn’t seem to mind much that one of their affiliates is regularly calling for the death and torture of liberal Americans. What bothered them is that someone cost them money by scaring their advertisers away. So they hit Spocko with cease-and-desist letters and bullied his ISP into taking his site offline, claiming that his audio clips constituted a violation of copyright – this, of course, in blatant disregard of the concept of fair use for the purposes of public critique or discussion, which is exactly what Spocko was doing. There was nothing the least bit illegal about his content, but it made Disney angry and so they took it offline. That to me is what’s important here – the idiots at KSFO said some pretty offensive stuff, natch, but I’ll give them that as free speech (up to a point – some of it is pretty reprehensible even for free speech, though). What angers me more is Disney using high-powered corporate lawyers to shut down a blogger who was completely in the right here.

Most of this went down over the last couple of weeks – Spocko’s site indicates that the C&D letter(s) hit just before Xmas, though I’m not sure at what point his site was taken down. The good news is, others online have picked up both the story and the offending media clips and are distributing both of them as widely as possible. In that same spirit, I’m sharing the story (and the media clips) on amphichon. Please feel free to share either with anyone you feel might like to know. The better news is, Spocko’s site seems to be nominally back online now, though apparently hosted elsewhere for the time being (abroad, maybe?). I don’t know if all of the original content is still present, so just in case I’ll maintain the mirror here.

Here’s the story on Daily Kos, and the comment to that story where Spocko talks about what folks can to do help.

Here are other discussions of the story on The Eleven aka Daai Tou Laam Diary and the Online Blogintegrity Project, both with full mirrors of Spocko’s audio files.

And finally the story will no doubt continue at the (reborn) Spockosbrain.

Give ‘em hell, Spocko. We got your back.

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