Tami Abdollah, Howard Blume/LAT on McIntyre/KABC/charter school lawsuit

Tami Abdollah and Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times take a "slightly different" tack on the lawsuit filed by Academia Semillas del Pueblo against Doug McIntyre of KABC ("L.A. charter school sues radio station", link).

They imply that trying to expose this school is just shock-jockery:

...Talk radio hosts have long taken advantage of 1st Amendment free speech protections that give them broad latitude... ...The lawsuit follows the firing of radio host Don Imus last week over a racist and sexist remark, which set off a large-scale debate over whether some talk-show hosts go too far... "Shock jocks" are not new, said Marty Kaplan of USC's Annenberg School for Communication. "The more they could make your jaw drop... the more their ratings went up - it has since become a standard genre."

Kaplan is also the director of "the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment" and he contributes to the Huffington Post (martyk *at* rcf.usc.edu). And, the Los Angeles Times has a history of covering up for extremists (ANSWER, Antonio Villaraigosa), so it shouldn't be surprising that they'd try to imply that investigative reporting is just "shock".

Then, there's this:

The lawsuit also quotes McIntyre as allegedly saying: "Aztecs butchered and ate Spanish invaders. I wonder if they're teaching that at ASDP." ...KABC would neither confirm nor deny whether McIntyre made those statements.

From that, the reader is supposed to assume that that statement is somehow false. Actually, a search for the exact phrase "Aztecs butchered, ate Spanish invaders" brings up over a hundred results; that was the title of a Reuters story from August 2006 (link, link).

Oh, the horror: a "shock jock" reading a Reuters story on the air.

Immigration2007a · Thu, 04/19/2007 - 09:46 · · Importance: 1