The Hate Goes On

The bile is dead. Long live the bile.

Michael Savage's abrupt departure from television, like his entry into it, has drawn attention all out of proportion to its importance. Last weekend, Savage's once-weekly cable talk show was cancelled by MSNBC due to an angry exchange with a gay caller. Savage, returning an insult, suggested that the caller die of AIDS. As a result, according to a network spokesman, "The decision to cancel the program was not difficult."

Neither was MSNBC's decision to launch Savage's program last March. It did so knowing full well that Savage's history -- indeed, his media raison d'etre -- was this sort of bile. For adding a single program stuck in the ghetto of weekend daytime, MSNBC got reams of free publicity for its shift to more conservative political fare. Progressive groups from GLAAD to NOW helped out, launching advertiser boycott campaigns that caused two major advertisers, Kraft and Proctor & Gamble, to pull out -- but that probably netted the cable network far more in additional free press. Struggling networks love well-publicized boycotts of controversial programs.

Progressive activists are now claiming victory over Savage's firing, proclaiming that it stands as proof that even the most vile media hatemongers cannot cross certain lines, and that when they do -- as Savage does regularly -- they can be held accountable. But everyone else is happy, too. MSNBC got publicity and credibility among the true believers for its new righter-than-Fox format. And Savage -- whose audience in other media is enormous -- stands confirmed in his bigotries. He will continue to do just fine, thank you.

The talk host issued what must rank as one of the more absurd, and insincere, apologies of all time on Monday. "If my comments brought pain to anyone, I certainly did not intend for this to happen," he said, asking for his "many listeners in the gay community to accept my apologies for any inadvertent insults which may have occurred."

May have occurred? Run the tape, please. Inadvertent? Sorry, when I told you to go die of a horrible disease I meant it as the highest compliment; it just came out wrong.

Savage didn't intend to cause pain -- just titillate his viewers and listeners. And if that audience includes "many" gays, they must surely be of the self-loathing type.

Those fans, tuning in this week on the hundreds of radio stations in every major American city and most smaller ones, are doubtless being treated to Savage's account of his MSNBC demise as filtered through his usual blistering rants on PCness: sodomites controlling the world, and so forth. His cancellation is just more fodder for a guy who rose to media prominence on a local San Francisco AM radio station due to his willingness to stand out for the sheer poisonousness of his anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-minority, anti-immigrant bile. MSNBC knew exactly what it was getting.

Savage still has his radio base, of course; most of the stations that air him do so as part of a day-long, nationally syndicated hate echo chamber alongside Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Dr. Laura, and a handful of others. All of them are relentlessly promoted across multiple media formats. Savage, at the moment, also has a briskly selling book, "The Savage Nation," that packages more of his dubious wisdom.

The problem, ultimately, with figures like Savage isn't that they encourage listeners to hate one or another constituency. It's that they use myths, exaggerations, unrepresentative anecdotes, and tortured logic to stake out extreme political and cultural positions; encourage listeners to identify, as a "community" of their own, with this fantasy club; and then encourage the audience to hate anyone who's not a member of the club.