Today's Daily Schadenfreude: Melanie Morgan and the fascists at KSFO

Have you been keeping up with the Spocko's Brain controversy? Short version: Spocko was offended by the messages of hate spewing forth from San Francisco radio station KSFO, and he decided to write to the station's advertisers to alert them to what they were supporting. When advertisers started cancelling their accounts, KSFO (an ABC/Disney station) fought back by strong-arming Spocko's ISP into shutting down his blog. Now, the San Francisco Chronicle has picked up the story, so for more details I'd refer you to their article yesterday.

Well, one of the worst offenders at KSFO, Melanie Morgan, responded yesterday, and it's obvious that she is utterly, irretrievably delusional.

There is a very, very serious story, folks, that we need to tell you about. We had hoped never to have this discussion on the air, that a crank with a keyboard would simply go away. But clearly, he has been joined by some very dangerous and frightening fringe-left groups in this country, and have tried to portray KSFO as a big corporate giant stomping on their rights to free speech, when in fact just the opposite is true. In the San Francisco Chronicle today, there's a big article about this, written by Joe Garafoli. The headline on page A2 is "Trying to Censor Blogger: Owner of conservative radio station KSFO demands liberal critic quit using audio clips."

Let me just sum this up for you. There is a liberal, left-wing kook by the name of Spocko's Brain, who is a Star Trek fan, and refuses to identify himself publicly and just cowers in anonymity. I think he's just a chicken bleep because he won't come forward with his own name. Of course, he attacks us as hate radio, as hatemongers, as spewers of violent rhetoric. Well, I have to tell you that what he has done is take a lot of our old comments from audio from our radio station, which is copyrighted. They're old, lacking in context, and in some cases just outright lies. He's put these audio cuts up on his little tiny website, and then he's contacted all of our advertisers and asked them to quit advertising with us and then, you know, keeps pushing these audio clips which are out of context, old, or in some cases just outright lies, as I said.

[...]

I'm not going to get into any more details about this, other than to say that tomorrow morn -- [Friday] at noon [Pacific time], we're going to do something we have never done before here at KSFO. We are going to bust out of our regular format, we are going to drop Dr. Laura programming at 12 noon tomorrow, and we are all going to go on live for three hours or however long it takes to answer all the questions. We are going to invite people to call us on the phones at 808-5600, we're going to invite the media to participate or watch -- either participate via our computer stream or to be involved by watching us here in the studio.

It's almost too easy to take apart Morgan's self-important rhetoric, and the commenters at Media Matters already have done so in fine fashion. The bottom line is, there's simply no defense for the hate speech that KSFO broadcasts. Morgan's attempt is simply pathetic: first, no one, least of all Spocko, claims that she and KSFO lack the right to spew the hate that they do; Spocko merely alerted advertisers to what they were saying, verbatim. Conversely, ABC/Disney's strongarm shutdown of Spocko's Brain is a restriction of free speech, for no other reason than they're WATBs. Second, regarding the clips themselves -- what "context" is necessary to interpret threats against Nancy Pelosi, calls to murder liberals, or any of the other incitements to violence that they've broadcast? And what the hell does Spocko's identity or anonymity have to do with the issue here? Morgan and her pals said what they said, and whether it's been disseminated by an anonymous blogger or by the Pope makes absolutely no difference.

Like so many other right-wing whackjobs, elected and otherwise, Morgan et al. whine about how they're the victims in all of this, but the facts, as always, clearly demonstrate otherwise. It might be worth listening at noon Pacific time (3:00 EST) today to see how KSFO defends itself, but I'm sure it's going to be nothing more than a massive circle-jerk for the hosts and their mouth-breathing, sycophantic followers. Don't expect any dissenting opinions to get past the call screeners ...

I'm proud of the liberal blogosphere and especially Spocko for taking a principled and eminently defensible stand here, and I'm honored to be on their team. Meanwhile, to Morgan and the other Hitler Youth at KSFO, congratulations - this Blast Off! Daily Schadenfreude is for you!