Tuning out the hate
Civility is ahead in the polls. No matter which candidates win on Tuesday, this election season is yielding a long overdue course correction for public discourse in the United States.
Voters are saying "no" to political advertising designed only to denigrate an opponent. That is why Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey's Republican campaign for governor of Massachusetts is in free fall. Even Democratic voters sympathetic to her candidacy and worried about crime know when they are being manipulated.
Voters are saying "yes" to partisanship fueled by ideas, not by vitriol. That's why Senator John F. Kerry's anemic attempt at humor failed so miserably last week. Even Democratic voters opposed to President Bush's disastrous misadventure in Iraq know the difference between a policy critique and a cheap shot.
Voters may even be saying "enough" to the noxious mix of bile and ego that has been peddled as political debate on talk radio for the last two decades. That's why there will be few tears shed for a Boston talk-show host who finds himself suddenly on the unemployment line.
So, John DePetro got fired. Spare me the bleating of those who charge that the WRKO morning mouth's free-speech rights were abridged when the Boston station's management drew the line at calling a gubernatorial candidate a "fat lesbian." DePetro was not some fearless proponent of unpopular political theory. He was a crude bore.
DePetro can insult Grace Ross's weight and wardrobe and sexual orientation on his own time; he has no inherent right to do so on airwaves owned by the American people and leased to the licensee with the understanding that programming will be conducted "in the public interest."
DePetro is understandably stunned by his termination. Where is the consistency? He worked for the same station that features Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist who routinely calls Edward M. Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts, "fat boy," and for the same ownership group that employs Rush Limbaugh, a prescription drug-abusing talking head who falsely accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson's disease to evoke political sympathy for supporters of stem-cell research.
He worked across town from WTKK where Jay Severin has called New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton "a lying [expletive]" and Kennedy "a fat piece of lying garbage," and from WEEI where John Dennis and Gerry Callahan claim to be sports commentators but spend as much time on the air spewing misogynist, xenophobic, and homophobic hate speech as they do talking about the Patriots or the Red Sox.
No one but the hosts has ever pretended that this radio programming is anything more than entertainment for the terminally irate. The same regular callers weigh in day after day. But history demonstrates that the format does have the potential to illuminate as well as to coarsen our public conversation.
The late David Brudnoy was a libertarian who welcomed a different point of view. In his occasional radio commentaries, Peter Meade, now a prominent Boston business executive, still provides the context behind political campaigns and policy initiatives that characterized his evening drive-time radio show on WBZ years ago. Without vilifying his political opponents, the late Jerry Williams was able to mobilize his listeners to political action, whether against mandatory seat belt laws or against tax increases. He did not stoop to name-calling to do it.
DePetro's defense, that his gratuitous remarks about Ross are consistent in tone with those of his equally sophomoric colleagues, fell on deaf ears either because his lousy ratings made him not worth keeping or because this stuff really is starting to get old.
His fate should serve as a warning to others behind the microphone: schoolyard epithets might at last be headed back to the playground where pint-sized bullies still have time to mature into thinking adults.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 