BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Saturday, October 04, 2003
Callahan, too. The Boston
Herald's got a problem with one of its own. The paper deals with
it straightforwardly today.
Dean
Johnson reports that the
alleged monologue by WEEI Radio (AM 850) blabber John Dennis about
gorillas and black schoolchildren was actually a dialogue involving
Dennis and his cohost, Herald columnist Gerry
Callahan.
For the past few days, everyone
(including me) has been reporting that Dennis -- commenting on Little
Joe, the gorilla who escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo -- had said
that he was "probably a Metco gorilla waiting for a bus to take him
to Lexington."
But Greater Boston, the
public-affairs program of WGBH-TV (Channel 2), obtained an audio
tape, and it turns out that it actually went like this:
Callahan: "They caught him
at a bus stop, right -- he was like waiting to catch a bus out of
town."
Dennis: "Yeah, yeah -- he's a
Metco gorilla."
Callahan: "Heading out to
Lexington."
Dennis: "Exactly."
(Disclosure: I was a panelist on
Greater Boston yesterday, and was on the set when the tape was
played.)
Meanwhile, pressure continues to
build for Dennis either to quit or be fired by WEEI. I'm not going to
call on Dennis specifically to go. The problem is the genre of
idiotic, racist, homophobic locker-room sports-guy talk more than it
is any one individual.
But it sounds like, during a call
to WEEI yesterday in the midst of his two-day suspension, Dennis said
all the right things, admitting that not only did he say something
"stupid," but that he's got "sensitivity issues" to deal with as
well.
And now WEEI (and the
Herald) has to decide what, if anything, to do about Callahan,
too.
Today's
Globe, by the way,
buries the Callahan revelation in a long piece about Boston city
councilor Jim Kelly's refusal to call for Dennis's firing, and fails
to credit Greater Boston's exclusive.
Arnold, not getting
it
"It's too bad nobody came
up to me before and sat down and said I still feel hurt about what
you said," he said Friday, "and I could have apologized right then
and there. I never got the chance."
-- Arnold
Schwarzenegger, quoted
in the New York Times today
The waitress said she told
Schwarzenegger at the time: "If you're ever some place and some
woman throws hot coffee on your head, it will be me." He laughed,
she said.
"He thought it was the funniest
thing. And then the whole table laughed because, if Arnold
laughed, the whole table laughed."
-- Los
Angeles Times,
October 2 (The woman said Schwarzenegger had told her, "I want you
to go in the bathroom, stick your finger in your [vagina],
and bring it out to me.")
Limbaugh: a hypocrite after
all? I've gotten a number of critical comments regarding
my
Thursday item, in which I
absolved Rush Limbaugh -- accused of having a serious pill problem --
of the charge of hypocrisy when it comes to the war on
drugs.
Several Media Log readers say the
one quote I found is more than counterbalanced by numerous other
comments the Formerly Rotund One has made over the years.
They may have a point. On Friday,
Washington Post media reporter Howard
Kurtz noted that, in 1999,
Limbaugh said that "by legalizing drugs, all you're going to do is
define further deviancy downward."
Here's
what Limbaugh said about
the drug story on his radio show yesterday:
Now, here's the nub of it
at the moment. The story in Florida is -- it really is an emerging
situation. I watch what's being reported on television and it
changes from morning to morning, hour to hour, day to day. I don't
know yet what I'm dealing with there, folks.
I really don't know the full
scope of what I am dealing with. And when I get all the facts,
when I get all the details of this, rest assured that I will
discuss this with you and tell you how it is, tell you everything
there is, maybe more than you want to know about this. You can
believe me and trust me on that. I don't want to answer any
questions about it now, as I say, until I know exactly what I'm
dealing with, and at that point I will fill you all in.
Pretty weird, huh? To say that it's
not exactly a denial is almost beside the point.
posted at 10:37 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
