Jul 11, 2003  |  By: CHRISTOPHER SEELY  | COMMENTS     

Fifteen episodes into his television career, popular author and radio talk show host Michael Savage lost his MSNBC job Monday over an anti-gay tirade to a crank caller.

On the July 5 broadcast of “Savage Nation,” Savage lashed out against Bob Foster, a 39-year-old computer technician in Sacramento, Calif., who regularly calls television talk shows to rile the hosts.

“I look for reactions,” Foster told the Washington Blade. “I do it for entertainment purposes. It’s what I get out of the person I’m calling.” He even chronicles the exchanges on his Web site, EastCoastBob.com

Foster’s call to Savage began with a conversation about smoking, but it quickly turned ugly after Foster made a disparaging comment about Savage’s teeth.

“I said, ‘“The Don and Mike Show” should take over your show so you can go to a dentist appointment because your teeth are really bad,’” Foster said this week. Transcripts from the show are incomplete because some of the comments were unintelligible.

After Savage asked Foster if he was a sodomite, and Foster said, “Yes, I am,” Savage’s tirade began.

“Oh, you’re one of the sodomites,” he said. “You should only get AIDS and die, you pig.”

MSNBC fired Savage on July 7, according to Jeremy Gaines, an MSNBC spokesperson. Boston radio station WRKO later suspended Savage’s radio program, according to the Boston Globe.

“Savage made an extremely inappropriate comment, and the decision was not difficult,” Gaines said.

Savage apologizes
On Tuesday, Savage apologized on his Web site, www.michaelsavage.com.

“If my comments brought pain to anyone, I certainly did not intend for this to happen,” according to the Web posting. “I especially appeal to my many listeners in the gay community to accept my apologies for any inadvertent insults which may have occurred.”

During his radio show on Monday, Savage claimed he had signaled to the MSNBC production staff to take the caller off the air and said he had mistakenly assumed that his brief rant against the caller would be taken out as well.

“But his insults continued in my ear piece, and I reacted to him personally as an individual who was attacking me,” Savage told his radio listeners. “Trying to defend myself, I attacked him individually. Unfortunately, now my personal comments to this crank caller were broadcast on the air.”

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a gay media watchdog group that organized protests against Savage’s TV show and complained to its advertisers, credits itself for bringing Savage’s anti-gay tirade to the attention of MSNBC executives.

“MSNBC was put in a place where they had to assess if they would keep journalistic integrity or Savage,” said Chalee Snorton, a GLAAD regional media spokesperson.

GLAAD plans to wait to see if MSNBC’s decision has an impact on Savage’s radio show, Snorton said.

But MSNBC was already aware of Savage’s comments before hearing from GLAAD, Gaines said.

The show had a Nielsen rating of 0.2, with an average of 347,000 viewers each week, and MSNBC’s viewer numbers for Savage were up 89 percent last month, compared with the same time slot in June 2002, according to the network.

Getting Savage off television is only half the battle, according to Thomas Leavitt, co-founder of SavageStupidity.com, a Web site formed in May 2002 that joins MichaelSavageSucks.com in an effort to remove Savage from the radio airwaves as well as television.

“This guy makes Dr. Laura look like a pussycat,” Leavitt said. “It was astonishing to me that when he was fourth-highest rated radio talk show host, he was invisible.”

Oregon-based Talk Radio Network syndicates Savage’s radio talk show, “The Savage Nation,” which ranks fifth in the nation with an audience estimated at 6.5 million listeners daily, according to a 2002 study by Talkers Magazine. It is carried by about 320 stations.

In May, Talk Radio filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against SavageStupidity.com, TakeBackTheMedia.com and MichaelSavageSucks.com.