The Empire Strikes Back

It goes without saying that when Disney/ABC moved to shut down the website Spocko's Brain a few weeks back, a firestorm has erupted. And of course, according to the thin-skinned hosts of KSFO in San Francisco, it's the fault of us evil liberals.

The aforementioned hosts, Melanie Morgan, Brian Sussman, Officer Vic and Lee Rodgers were in full damage control mode in a special on-air broadcast last Friday afternoon. And of course, not surprisingly, they played the part of the helpless victim. Prior to the show, Morgan fired off an email to over a million conservatives, claiming that liberal bloggers were trying to get her fired. She even had the email published at conservative blog World Net Daily. According to her, she is "the target ... of an effort by liberal bloggers to get me fired for engaging in what these far-left activists are calling 'hate speech.' " Morgan stated that this "move by liberal activists to silence conservative radio hosts comes after the failure of the left-wing Air America radio network."

This show was a damage control effort aimed at reversing the flight of their advertisers. Morgan's co-hosts defended her email blast by saying that the show streams to thousands of people that listen on the Internet. What the hosts did not say is that advertising is not broadcast on the internet stream. The callers from outside the immediate Bay Area listening area will never hear a KSFO advertisement without travelling to KSFO's broadcast range. As such, Morgan's email served only to jam their phone lines with a self-selected conservative activist constituency. Dissenting viewpoints never had a chance to get through the busy signals.

They did, however, allow a few critics to voice their grievances. Morgan read an email from someone named Jay, who spoke of Morgan's effort to lean on movie theater owners to keep Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, from being screened in theaters, via her dummy organization Move America Forward. She claimed that she did nothing that could be construed as attempting to silence Moore's freedom of expression. Uh huh.

You can read more at Media Matters for America, which has been heavily documenting recent events involving KSFO and Spocko. In addition, Mike Stark has been chronicling events, and even called in to Friday's KSFO broadcast. Both Media Matters and Stark have audio snippets of the show. And don't forget Spocko, the guy who started it all.