Now I know how the others feel.

Having written extensively about talk radio’s right wing shock jocks and the hate speech they regularly use to tar opponents – equating liberals with terrorists, homosexuals with child rapists and the Mafia, and political and media figures with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (even calling on air for assassinations, as Michael Reagan, son of the late president, did last month) – it was only a matter of time until the smear merchants took aim at me.

Still, it was a little surprising to hear that “O’Connor’s mentor in spirit, Josef Goebbels, must be laughing in his grave.” And it was more than just disconcerting that the charge of Nazism was made as part of an attack on the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the award-winning tolerance group named for the late ‘Nazi Hunter,’ after the Center’s New York office offered to host a launch party for my book “Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio.”

The allegation that Goebbels is my mentor came in an email forwarding a post by former Boston Herald writer Don
DonFeder.com Feder, which originally appeared on GrasstopsUSA.com (“Give Your Values A Voice”.) Feder, the email said, “believes that the Wiesenthal Center supports deceptive fools like O’Connor to appease its wealthy leftist supporters. If that is true (and of course no offical [sic] at the Center would own up to it), it is shameful.”

What’s really shameful, of course, is trotting out the ad hominem “You’re a Nazi” meme when confronted with ideas that differ from your own. Feder’s “exclusive commentary” was headlined “Obama and the Conspiracy to Kill Talk Radio,” another false meme being consistently bruited about by the right. Its opening made Feder’s thesis clear: “Looking ahead, liberals are determined to derail potential opposition to their plans to accelerate the deconstruction of America. Consequently, they have targeted talk radio. Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is just one facet of their scheme to eviscerate the only part of the media controlled by conservatives.”

According to Feder & Company, “The jihad against talk radio” (I thought I was a Nazi, not an Islamofascist!) is this:

“The left will do anything to gag its opponents. From the college campus to the halls of Congress (think campus speech codes, think hate crimes legislation, think speech-suppression zones surrounding abortion clinics), liberals are the chief proponents of censorship in America.

On July 23, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s New York Tolerance Center will host the launch of “Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio” by Rory O’Connor, a book which indicts talk radio as “highly politicized, overly partisan and often factually challenged” — unlike, say, The New York Times, AKA, Mainstream Media Hacks for Obama.

But that’s not all. According to its cover, this penetrating analysis (endorsed by Walter Cronkite, the dean of liberal media manipulators) exposes the “dirty secret” of radio talk shows — how “they use the guise of ‘not being politically correct’ to ratchet up their anti-gay, anti-woman and overtly racist language.” In other words, they’re against same-sex “marriage,” reject feminist mythology and oppose racial quotas. Oh, the venom! Oh, the malice!

The left uses allegations of hate speech to set the stage for censorship. In its invitation, the Wiesenthal Center hyperventilates: ‘Hate speech can lead to hate crimes. And hate speech has no role on the public airwaves.’ Apparently, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to anything the left deems “hate speech.”

FYI, a friend of mine — a Jewish conservative — noted the exquisite irony here: Conservative talk-show hosts tend to be the most outspoken defenders of Israel anywhere in the U.S. media, while their counterparts in the mainstream media are overwhelmingly anti-Israel. Like the Anti-Defamation League, the Wiesenthal Center carries water for the left in the guise of fighting anti-Semitism.

‘Shock Jocks’ is just the latest manifestation of the left’s obsession with talk radio.”

Feder’s unoriginal jeremiad – which he further promulgated on WABC’s Sunday morning “Religion on the Line” program with Rabbi Joe Patasnick — went to repeat what other right-wing media organs such as NewsMax and WorldNetDaily have already attempted to inject into the mainstream—the ridiculous idea that there is a conspiracy afoot to “Hush Rush” and knock conservatives off the airwaves by requiring “fairness” and “balance” in our public discourse.

Normally I ignore such ignorant attacks on my person, along with absurd charges like the one that Barack Obama is somehow engaged in a stealth “conspiracy to kill” talk radio. I raise them now only because of a real conspiracy to kill – one that took two lives in a Tennessee church recently. After a troubled man named Jim Adkisson murdered two and wounded seven, it was reported that he had books by shock jocks Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly in his home. (What wasn’t widely reported is that radio station WNOW-FM in Knoxville airs shock jocks Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz and Mark Levin every weekday. Given the killer’s professed hateful attitudes towards liberals and homosexuals, it’s at least as likely that he was influenced by the hateful speech Savage and the others spew forth on the public airwaves as by their books….)

So when these and other shock jocks regularly employ and promote hate speech over the public airwaves aimed at women, minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, foreigners, Islam and its adherents, and anyone else they perceive as an opponent, dehumanizing them with terms like ‘feminazis,’ ‘hos,’ ‘slanty-eyed gooks’ and the like…and when they consistently blur the borders between news, opinion and entertainment, then quickly retreat when challenged, claiming it’s just ‘good fun,’ asking why you’re being so ‘politically correct,’ and demanding that you just ‘change the channel’… and their audience is angry and armed — what do you expect to happen?

Are the shock jocks creating a climate where such acts are somehow deemed acceptable? Do they have blood on their hands if others – albeit a few, marginalized, desperate and deranged listeners — act on their poisonous rhetoric? Would Jim Adkisson have killed without prompting from extreme right wing talkers? We’ll never know—but isn’t it time to step back and think about the effect this sort of debased dialogue is having on our democracy and society? It’s not ‘just entertainment’ any more—if indeed it ever was. Instead, it’s now literally a deadly serious business, and we all need to examine our accountability—as well as to look for new strategies to contain the spread of hate speech in our media — before someone else gets killed.

In the last few months alone, Michael Reagan has called for murder on-air; Rush Limbaugh has hoped for riots in Denver at the Democratic National Convention and spoken about a non-existent tape of Michelle Obama castigating ‘Whitey’; Bill O’Reilly has mentioned Michelle Obama and a lynching party in the same breath; Don Imus has (again) engaged in racially charged remarks; and Michael Savage has called autistic children ‘idiots’ and ‘morons’ and charged that both autism and asthma are ‘rackets.’

As previously noted, the real racket is the shock jock racket. You know, the one where everyone gets paid—Savage, Limbaugh (to the tune of 400 million dollars), Hannity (100 million), etc.—but also local stations like WOR in New York City, which expressed ‘regret’ but took ‘no responsibility’ for Savage’s remarks; national distributors like Talk Radio Networks –the second largest provider of syndicated talk shows– and its headman Mark Masters, who puts Savage on 350 stations reaching 8 million listeners every week; and of course their corporate advertisers and sponsors. So let’s pressure the corporations who are using the public airwaves but not serving the public interest – and let’s challenge the shock jocks whose dehumanizing talk may be leading to terror and hate acts such as that which played out so tragically in a church in Knoxville.

In remarks given at my recent book launch party at the Tolerance Center, I specifically warned about shock jocks’ hate speech and the potential for some listener actually to take their advice literally, and to act on it in a real world “conspiracy to kill.” Some attendees later told me “You called it.” I hope not.

Angry citizen reaction to the latest cynical, cyclical outpouring of hateful speech over the public radio airwaves – top-rated talk show host Michael Savage’s despicable attack on autistic children as “brats, morons and idiots” – has once again injected America’s talk radio problem back into the mainstream news cycle. But why did it take a full week of protests, pressure, pickets, pullouts by advertiser, and stations dropping the program – Savage’s remarks occurred on the July 16 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show –– before the mainstream media finally responded to the latest outrage? Is it because they are part of the racket?

Savage claimed on his program The Savage Nation that autism is a “fraud, a racket.” He also stated that the ongoing asthma epidemic is “a money racket” staged by “the minority community” to get “extra welfare.” Here’s how the racket works, according to the hatemonger Savage: “When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], ‘I don’t know, the dust got me.’ See, everyone had asthma from the minority community.”

As should be obvious now to all but the most biased observers, the real money racket at play here is the shock jock racket. Everyone involved is getting rich: from top shock jocks like Savage, Rush Limbaugh, (who recently signed a new $400 million dollar contract) and Sean Hannity (who recently signed a new deal in excess of $100 million) to local radio stations like New York’s WOR (which expressed “regret” over Savage’s remarks but took no “responsibility” for them) to national syndicators like Premiere, ABC Radio Networks and the Talk Radio Network, (which pushes Savage out to more than 350 radio stations — and whose CEO Mark Masters trumpets the “fearless entrepreneurial environment at TRN” while he fearfully ducks reporters’ calls) to advertisers and sponsors (like Home Depot and Anheuser-Busch, which unlike the estimable AFLAC continue to advertise on The Savage Nation.) And let’s not forget about the shock jocks’ elite enablers, drawn from the upper echelons of the corrupt nexus of Big Media and Big Politics, who sell their political platforms, books and souls in exchange for audience access…

Although children’s advocates are calling for his head and demanding that Savage apologize and retract his statements — and calling for a boycott of stations that air his show — Savage is offering in lieu of an apology an absurd explanation that his remarks were merely intended to stimulate a dialogue.

“My comments about autism were meant to boldly awaken parents and children to the medical community’s attempt to label too many children or adults as ‘autistic,’” he claimed.

Equally absurd is the statement that WOR Radio posted on its Web site:

“The views expressed by Michael Savage are his views and are not those of WOR Radio. As Michael Savage is a syndicated show, the content is the responsibility of the syndicator, which is Talk Radio Networks.

Unfortunately, it is impossible for WOR Radio to know the subject matter in advance of airing. WOR is in the business of serving the community in which we broadcast. That is our stated goal, and we will continue to do so. We regret any consternation that his remarks may have caused to our listeners.”

Can someone please explain how calling autistic children “morons” is serving the community? Maybe I’m missing something!

Or maybe Evelyn Ain, whose 8-year-old son has been diagnosed with autism and who organized a demonstration this week outside WOR, stated the situation more accurately: “That isn’t just freedom of speech, it is hateful speech when you say 99 percent of children with autism are brats.” (Savage responded to the protest by noting that “some in New York… suspect it was a staged protest by the Stalinist Savage-haters.”)

Other parents and activists responded by calling on Talk Radio Network to fire Savage. As Jim Ward, founder and president of ADA Watch and the National Coalition for Disability Rights, said:

“As America prepares to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, people with disabilities, parents, family members, friends and advocates across the nation are outraged over Savage’s latest attack on people with disabilities. His despicable assault on children with autism — calling them ‘frauds’ and ‘brats’ — is rightly being condemned as hateful and bigoted. But it is just the latest of Savage’s numerous and painful attempts to demean and disenfranchise people with disabilities.”

And the insurance company Aflac responded as well, by withdrawing all advertising from Savage’s show. Company spokeswoman Laura Kane said, “We understand that radio hosts pick on any number of targets however we found Michael Savage’s recent comments to be both inappropriate and insensitive.”

Experts estimate that about 1 in 150 children have some form of autism. Telling them and their parents that it’s all just a racket to make money –- as means of enriching yourself, your distributors and your sponsors – is beneath contempt.

Yet Savage shows no shame. Instead, in Orwellian fashion, he is portraying himself as a victim, defending his remarks on the Larry King Show, guest-hosted by fellow shock jock Glenn Beck, by noting, “What a shame it is that I — as a man who has spent his entire life defending the defenseless, mainly children — should have to defend myself from charges leveled at me …by ripping things out of context and making me look like the monster.”

He also responded on his own show, asking, “Do you want to live in a world where one statement that offends somebody could cost you your career?

One statement, taken out of context? Hardly! Like Don Imus and others of his ilk, Savage is a serial if cowardly transgressor, who regularly uses hate speech to attack homosexuals, minorities, women, and foreigners in the most vitriolic manner imaginable. He once told a gay caller to his (thankfully canceled) MSNBC cable program he hoped they “Get AIDS and die, you pig!” He said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Larry King “together look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis.” He equates immigrants with “the junkie, the freak, the pervert.” He’s so extreme that Bill O’Reilly calls him a “smear merchant,” Neal Boortz refers to him as “the Antichrist” and Talkers Magazine publisher Michael Harrison, who recently bestowed an annual Freedom of Speech award upon Savage, says he thinks the man is “an asshole.”

Nevertheless his program appears on 350 stations across America. Wait—this just in: make that 343—seven Mississippi stations have just decided to stop carrying The Savage Nation. Now what about the rest of them?

It was too good to be true.

The Romanian Senate recently and unanimously voted in favor of a law that would require fifty percent of the news reported by media outlets in that country to distribute “positive news.”

Senators said the law would help to fight against “the extraordinary harms of negative news and their irreversible effects on health and people’s lives,” and left it to Romania’s National Council for Audiovisual Broadcasting to decide what constitutes good or bad news.

But no — the Council was not content to leave enough good alone, and swiftly denounced the new law. “News is news,” noted Council president Rasvan Popescu. “It is neither positive nor negative, it simply reflects reality.” Press freedom groups such as Reporters Without Borders also criticized the proposal, calling it “unacceptable for a member state of European Union,” and comparing it to similar laws in countries such as China and North Korea.

Faced with this summary of discontent, Romania’s constitutional court ruled last week that the law infringed freedom of expression and was thus unconstitutional. The ruling blocked the government’s effort to require radio and television stations to broadcast good and bad news in equal proportions. “Romanians have a right to doom and gloom,” concluded Agence France-Presse.

The aim of the law, according to two senators who had proposed it, was to “improve the general climate and to offer to the public the chance to have balanced perceptions on daily life, mentally and emotionally”. But as Audiovisual Council president Popescu concluded, “I don’t believe that the introduction of such a quantitative criteria can work. Events cannot be programmed, nor can minds.”

It’s easy to make fun of this brief Romanian rollout of media-mandated happiness, of course. Sophisticated media savants, after all, are always quick with a quip about the naïve natives… But judging from this week’s hysterical outcry over the controversial New Yorker cover illustration showing a “Muslim, flag-burning, Osama-loving, fist-bumping Obama,” and the resulting calls from the media that the media restrain itself from such “tasteless and offensive” displays, maybe we’re not as sophisticated as we claim. Maybe we don’t believe that “Events cannot be programmed, nor can minds.” Instead, maybe we fear that they can.

If so, is anyone else ready to cowboy up for some more happy news? If so, maybe we can sponsor legislation that will in the future forbid all such “arrogant, indulgent, derogatory, incendiary, shocking and (maybe) racist” acts of journalism?

Oops — you’re right, that would be unconstitutional, wouldn’t it?

Conservative fears of an impending Democratic attack on talk radio - dubbed the “Hush Rush” effort in an homage to top-rated radio talker Rush Limbaugh — continue to escalate, despite ample evidence that such an assault is unlikely to occur when (as is likely) Democrats sweep back into power in the forthcoming elections in November.

As noted recently on the “Focus on the Family action” website citizenlink.com, conservative fears of a supposed return to the Federal Communications Commission’s long-defunct Fairness Doctrine remain unabated. In a post entitled “Take Action: Ask Congress to Protect Talk Radio,” Managing Editor Jennifer Mesko recently wrote, “Democrats have threatened to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine which would force conservative stations to broadcast liberal viewpoints.”

In response, says Mesko, “Radio broadcasters and some members of Congress are calling on Democrats to celebrate July Fourth — dubbed “Radio Independence Day” — by pledging to protect the airwaves from censorship.”

As previously reported, “Leading hard-right conservatives, led by their talk radio ’shock jock’ shock troops, have been worrying aloud about the supposed return of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine ever since their stunning success last year in defeating bi-partisan immigration reform.”

Although most informed observers believe the right’s existential angst is unfounded, it is nonetheless real — and has spurred former broadcaster and current congressman Mike Pence, R-Ind., to introduce the Broadcaster Freedom Act (H.R. 2905), which would prohibit the FCC from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. “Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would amount to government control of political views on the commercial and religious airwaves of America, and it must be opposed,” Pence told Family News in Focus, while calling on Congress to support the Broadcaster Freedom Act before July Fourth. Shock jock Laura Ingraham joined Pence, saying, “This is nothing more than an attempt to have government regulate one of the most effective forms of political discussion today.”

Of course, only a year ago more than three hundred members of Congress — including 113 Democrats — supported a moratorium on the Fairness Doctrine!

Meanwhile, other conservatives, such as Jim Boulet Jr., executive director of English First and organizer of the website KeepRushontheAir.com are claiming that the cunning (if Republican-controlled) FCC — employing a little known tactic Boulet terms “legislation by stealth” — may instead “reinstate the Fairness Doctrine via something called ‘localism.’”

In a National Review Online post headlined “FCC Tries to Hush Rush,” Boulet assails the “tyranny of ‘cultural diversity’ while citing “a little-noticed item in the Federal Register” he claims will soon hand the FCC “the power to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air.”

Liberals are obsessed with “balancing” Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, and the rest of conservative talk radio, says Boulet, “even though plenty of other outlets — the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio — constantly flog the liberal agenda.” And since the “Hush Rush crowd’s dream” to revive the so-called “Fairness Doctrine … using the democratic process,” has failed, Boulet says, “regulations proposed on January 28 by the Federal Communications Commission would effectively reinstate the Fairness Doctrine via something called ‘localism.’”

This “legislation by stealth” means that “most of the Fairness Doctrine’s opponents might not know about it until it’s too late,” says Boulet. “Which isn’t to say it was impossible to see this coming. The Left has long sought new ways of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and their latest gambit features a sizable dose of political correctness.”

Right-wingers like Boulet charge that a 2007 Center for American Progress/Free Press report called The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio “cleverly recasts the Fairness Doctrine as ‘localism’ by stating that ‘any effort to encourage more responsive and balanced radio programming will first require steps to increase localism.’”

Boulet apparently believes the FCC “has swallowed the Center’s diversity rationale whole” and that “cultural diversity” requirements will soon be imposed that will have the effect of knocking Rush Limbaugh and his ilk off the air. “This cultural diversity is to be enforced by professional ethnic activists and other perpetual malcontents,” claims Boulet.

As a result, he opines, “Should the FCC prevail, radio stations will return to the sort of programming that predominated during the days of the Fairness Doctrine, only filtered by 2008-style political correctness. Instead of full debate on controversial issues such as amnesty for illegal aliens, AM radio will become a herd of independent minds, a vast “Air America” from sea to shining sea in which never a conservative word is heard.”

Although this putative threat to the First Amendment simply isn’t real, the notion that the days of right-wing dominance of the airwaves may well be numbered is rapidly becoming a reality — not because of any government-imposed regulation, but simply because the political tide appears to be turning at last, and our long national nightmare may in fact be drawing to a close.

Happy “Radio Independence Day,” everyone!

Click here to get a copy of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio..