The Passion of Sandra Tsing Loh - UPDATED 3/6 2:23P.M.
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For those following the Loh drama, Cathy Seipp posts that Allan Mayer is encouraging everyone to open up a can of angry Spam on the woman who fired her, KCRW figurehead Ruth Seymour ..
Seipp says:
Which reminds me: If you want to support the campaign to irritate KCRW's Ruth Seymour even further about the fallout from Sandra's firing, Allan Mayer has written a letter you can use as a model. (This link leads you to the comments box for this post. Allan's letter is the 2nd from the top.)
Allan says:
If like me you were appalled and disgusted by Ruth Seymour's shoddy treatment of Sandra Tsing Loh, please let the Kool Aid drinkers at KCRW know how you feel. Here is a draft of a letter you should feel free to copy or adapt as you please. Email it to mail@kcrw.org. And forward this note to as many likeminded friends as you can. Let's start an avalanche that hits Ruth Seymour where she lives and buries her in a landslide of justified outrage.
My earlier post on the subject:
Free speech is not dead in Los Angeles, but it's coughing up blood.
What's amazing is not that Loh lost her gig though she apparently never intended for the obscenity to reach the airwaves, both censoring it in her transcript and saying she intended for the engineer to bleep it before airtime.
Loh's little rant about her musician husband was supposed to go, "but he does play guitar for Bette Midler on her massive new stage show - there are times when he stands within five feet of her! So I guess I have to f*@k him," Seipp reports.
What slays me is Seipp's news that KCRW's fundraising empress and crisp matrician figurehead, programming director Ruth Seymour, phoned Loh the next day to say that they were dropping Loh's regular show, but only putting the engineer on probation. Cowardly *and* nonsensical for a station that likely has never even been sniffed at by the FCC, as opposed to Howard Stern's show, which has had the feds so far up its ass they're using his mouth to censor what's ultimately - if offensive - harmless frathouse humor.
I snicker occasionally at Loh's type-A hummingbird diatribes about the Valley, food, her quirky old dad and the general frivolity and futility of hipness in L.A. as much as the next guy.
Her singsongy delivery has always rather grated on me (no doubt, my delivery grates at times, too) but her content's always good - she's a unique, smart voice in the brainless cacophony that passes for most local radio in this town.
To get perfectly hyperbolic and hyperventilate about it, the almighty FCC threatens to quash racy broadcast talent like Loh, Howard Stern and Janet Jackson the way HUAC went after Communists of good conscience.
It's not that speaking your mind these days can screw your career: It's the risk of speaking at all.
The fact that it's happened at what used to be a little nonprofit radio station in a community college bassement that has mutated into one of the biggest, richest and - until now - most outspoken and invigorating nodes for public voice in Los Angeles should chill and frighten anyone in the content biz.
Put in your earplugs, put on your eyeshades, you know where to put the cork.
Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, March 04, 2004 - 11:34 PM
