Re: CLEAR CHANNEL SUSPENDS JOCK
Monday, 29-Nov-1999 13:35:59 24.92.211.45
writes: Radio Host Suspended After Remark
TOLEDO, Ohio, Nov 29, 1999 (AP Online)
A radio talk show host began a week-long suspension today for telling his listeners the Rev. Jesse Jackson wanted to get assassinated.
''There is a limit to what we will allow on the public airwaves,'' said Andy
Stuart, vice president and market manager for Clear Channel Communications Inc., which suspended WSPD-AM radio host Scott Sloan without pay. Sloan's comments angered religious and city leaders, but Stuart said that while Sloan was not trying to incite violence, his comments were ''totally inappropriate and outside the bounds of good taste.'' Sloan's phone number was unlisted, and he could not be reached to comment.
`During his three-hour show on Nov. 17, Sloan said Jackson intervened in a Decatur, Ill., dispute to be a martyr like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who died April 4, 1968, after he was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. Sloan called the Lorraine Hotel in Miami, Fla., asking if the rooms had balconies. ''All we need now is a shooter,'' he said on the air.
`Six students at Decatur's Eisenhower High School were expelled for a
Sept. 17 brawl at a football game. Jackson, who has been protesting the expulsions, was arrested Nov. 16 at the central Illinois school. The Rev. Rudolph Sutton, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference's Toledo chapter and pastor of Spring Street Baptist Church, asked the radio station to fire Sloan, whose show has been on the air for more than three years.
`Copyright 1999 Associated Press, All rights reserved.
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