From yesterday’s Taylor on Radio newsletter…
Emmis breaks up KLBJ, Austin’s Todd & Don Show, after the “wetback” protests.
That’s considered to be a particularly objectionable term of derision by many Mexican-Americans, and Don Pryor kept employing it on last Tuesday’s show…
Wetback? What broadcaster in his right mind is using that kind of language in 2009? The answer is: too many under-qualified, poorly trained, lightly supervised talk show hosts. The recent spate of similar incidents — hosts berating Hispanics as VD-carriers, joking about beating transgender teens, doing their show in blackface after Obama’s election — I’m beginning to wonder whether the fault lies with management. Even the best talent needs guidance, feedback and a clear set of rules and expectations. Are today’s often overworked and/or under-qualified talk PDs able to provide all that support to their hosts? Owners and GMs should think about that — for the sake of their stations, and the talk format itself. Later this year the FCC will start to get serious about its “localism” rules, which could easily become a first step toward content regulation by the Commission. When that process begins, every one of these idiotic comments will be entered as evidence that talk radio must be “brought under control.”
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What made this one all the more incredible is that the “Todd” of the “Todd and Don Show” is Todd Jeffries, the KLBJ News Director. You could make the case that KLBJ’s #2 management guy was sitting in the same studio as Don Pryor, perfectly content to let Pryor (himself the son of legendary TX radio personality Cactus Pryor) go on with his stupid gag.
Some say that Jeffries was trying to make Don stop, but really – he made no real effort. It was more of the wink-wink kind of “please don’t say it again…” just to set him up to do it some more. If Jeffries really cared, he would have ripped Pryor a new one during the commercial break and told him to stop.
In the case of KLBJ, this could be more a case of the News Director having too much leeway to wander from his official duties to go play radio host. He proved his irresponsibility and ought to be on his knees thanking God he still has a job at all.