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Public radio station fires host
WEMU-FM host Terry Hughes, known on the air as "Thayrone," was fired from the Eastern Michigan University public radio station Wednesday for repeatedly expressing his views about the war in Iraq, and refusing to run NPR news during his Sunday night music program "The Bone Conduction Show." Oooh! Sounds like Censorship®! Even McCarthyism®! Hughes was fired by station manager Art Timko. "Art said he was 'tired of the fight,' trying to get me to run news on the show and not have an opinion," Hughes said. In between the vintage Detroit R&B and soul music he plays, Hughes has been talking up the war in Iraq, expressing his support for the troops and for President Bush, and denigrating National Public Radio. Wanna bet what would have happened had his opinions been, uh... different? On his show this past Sunday, among other things, Hughes was explaining why the station's fund-raiser had been postponed: "Because (Bush) has the (guts) to get up to do the right thing after 18 attempts to get everybody to help..." Hughes also complained to his listeners about not wanting to run NPR news. "We know if you want a current assessment of what's going on, you're sure not listening to us," he said on last week's show. "You'll be over at Fox TV where they're not bending the news... It ain't happening on NPR." Obviously not... Station manager Timko's account doesn't differ much. "He was fired basically over philosophical differences," Timko said. "We have a policy that eliminates or restricts the expression of personal opinion on issues of controversy, and he didn't believe that applied to him." No more so than to other NPR commentators, anyway... The WEMU station manager admitted: "Thayrone has always been opinionated. But most of what he had opinions about was not controversial. This time, it was." "I mean, it's okay, as long as we agree with him, or it's on some subject that we don't care about..." Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-04-04 |
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