Mister D: Thanks to Deb and Allison for reminding me of this incident. I had read about it and then Bill Maher had Ms. Loh on his show Friday night to discuss it…anyway, here’s what all the fuss is about…this article comes from Yahoo News:
By Gina Keating
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A popular Asian-American radio commentator has been thrown off a Los Angeles public radio station for using a four-letter word, becoming the latest casualty in the cultural war over obscenity on the airwaves.
Commentator Sandra Tsing Loh said her use of the f-word in a prerecorded segment was an editing error but what KCRW-FM’s general manager Ruth Seymour said on Thursday was that Loh made calculated use of obscenity in a politically charged time.
“It is the equivalent of the Janet Jackson performance piece and there is not a radio or TV programmer today who does not understand the seriousness involved to the station,” Seymour said, referring to the now infamous breast-baring halftime show for the Feb. 1 Super Bowl.
She rejected Loh’s contention that the station had been at fault. “It’s her responsibility to deliver a program that is ready for broadcast,” Seymour said.
Loh, 42, learned on Monday from Seymour that her six-year run on KCRW-FM had abruptly ended a day after the station aired her three-minute riff on a Bette Midler concert she attended and in which her musician husband played.
“My husband, my soul mate, my ROOMMATE of 15 years — he sleeps LATE,
doesn’t LISTEN, moves my STUFF around. But he DOES play guitar for
Bette Midler on her MASSIVE new STAGE show. There are times he STANDS
within five FEET of her!,” the script read. “So I guess I have to f*** him.”
Although the quirky, uneven cadence of Loh’s delivery makes it appear that the segments materialize in her mind as she walks into the recording studio, they are carefully scripted, she told Reuters.
“We discussed it and (the engineer) said, ‘Say it and I’ll bleep it out,” Loh said.
The irony of the incident is that she feared Midler would be angry about her commentary and fire her husband.
She finds equal irony in being mentioned with shock jocks like Howard Stern, who recently lost several stations over obscenity claims. She noted that she just completed a five-part series on knitting.
“It’s shocking and I would never have toyed with saying that,” Loh said. “Of course I shouldn’t say that word on the air. It was never intended to be on the air.”
Loh will remain an occasional commentator on Minnesota Public Radio’s Marketplace, syndicated to about 300 U.S. stations, and as a reviewer for Atlantic Monthly.
“We don’t see any reason why we would change our relationship with (Loh) because it wasn’t on our air,” Marketplace Executive Producer J.J. Yore said. “This is really an unfortunate situation and that it happened at a time of such heightened sensitivity.”
