Strike Two For New York City Radio
Longtime followers of the site may remember the Tsunami
Song Rant. I never found out if Miss Jones and her oxygen thief cohosts ever
got fired for their stunt. If you don't remember the incident (which happened in
early 2005, but never got much coverage in the media), it involved the hosts of
the Hot 97 morning program singing a song making fun of the tsunami victims in
SE Asia, calling them among other things "Africans", "chinks", and "Chinamen". So
NYC was already on my bad side.
Then came JV and Elvis.
JV and Elvis, midday hosts for WFNY "92.3 Free FM", aired on April 5th a stunt
in which they called in to Chinese restaurants and had a computerized voice
order "shrimp flied lice" and tell the lady taking the order that he would
like to "see your hot Asian spicy ass". The hosts of the show referred to one
of the workers as a "very nice Chinese man that probably can't drive for shit".
This was one day after Don Imus's comments calling the Rutgers women basketball
players "nappy-headed hos", but apparently they saw nothing wrong with it. They
even had the temerity to reair the skit two weeks later, on April 19th.
On April 23rd, finally bowing to complaints from Asian civil rights groups, CBS
suspended JV and Elvis without pay indefinitely. Many groups say they want JV
and Elvis fired. After all, CBS canned Imus pretty quickly.
The skit is ridiculous, but I'm not so much offended by the CONTENT of the jokes
as I am by the attitude behind the skit. Saying Asians are bad at driving and
talking about 'flied lice' are such old jokes, and fully uncreative. It's nothing
less than the re-spewing of age-old stereotypes for a cheap laugh. Sort of like
what Carlos Mencia does on his show all the time. (As followers of this site will
notice, I despise Carlos Mencia. Racists love Carlos Mencia because he says out
loud all of the racist things they're thinking, but of course he gets away with it
because he's a minority.) It's the ATTITUDE, that's it's fine to say the same old
trash and that they expect people to find it funny, which sadly some of their audience
probably will. It's the abuse of free speech by shock jocks to say racially provocative
things just to provide entertainment. It would be a mistake to say that this is
just a problem of two white guys with bad judgment. This is more of an indictment on
the entire business of shock radio, where just like with the Tsunami Song incident,
the producers encourage the radio hosts to be as shocking and offensive as possible
because that's what provides the entertainment value and therefore the listeners, and
therefore the money.
Of course this skit didn't hit the media in the big way that the Imus thing did.
One could argue that it's because Imus is a much bigger household name, and that it
came first, both of which are certainly contributing factors. But there's another
factor here that I've mentioned before, and that is this - Asians aren't used to
complaining. Sure, the Asian civil rights groups complained, but they don't command
the same sort of media attention. Basically, Asians don't have a Jesse Jackson or an
Al Sharpton to drag this sort of idiocy screaming-and-kicking into the media spotlight.
You can bet that if JV and Elvis had instead aired a skit calling into a Church's
Chicken where they had a computerized voice speaking ebonics asking about watermelons,
Sharpton and Jackson would have ordered a press conference the day after and CBS would
have fired the DJs on the spot. Asians just don't get the same sort of media impact,
or the attention.
Which just brings us to the sad fact that this sort of thing will probably happen
again. Radio hosts will certainly be watching themselves to make sure they don't
pull a repeat of Imus's 'nappy-headed hos' comment. Sadly, with the seeming lack of
attention or consequences for offending Asians, those same hosts will be egged on
by their producers to do more of the same. All in the name of entertainment. It makes
me sick.