Fair-weather friends: when journalists desert from free speech battles.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns

ON MARCH 1 the Santa Monica radio station KCRW, the most lucrative link in the National Public Radio chain, fired the Los Angeles humorist Sandra Tsing Loh for saying the word fuck in a pretaped commentary. It was supposed to be bleeped for comic effect, but the engineer forgot and Loh didn't stick around to make sure. The piece ran twice on Sunday morning, February 29; by Monday, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour, a past recipient of the Los Angeles Times First Amendment Award, had given an apologetic Loh her walking papers.

"It is the equivalent of the Janet Jackson performance piece, and there is not a radio or TV programmer today who does not understand the seriousness involved to the station," Seymour told Reuters. "You cannot say 'fuck' on the air, period," she explained to the L.A. CityBeat. "We could lose our license."

Even though no radio station has ever lost its license over an unintentional fuck, this was a clear-cut free speech issue. When one of the West Coast's most respected media organizations cites fear of a shutdown as the reason to fire a 42-year-old mother of two who was in the midst of a five-part series on knitting, the justification is either an example of the chilling effect that government regulation has on speech or an inflammatory excuse to get rid of an unwanted employee. Either way, damage was done to the climate for free expression on the airwaves.

You would think that reporters, broadcasters, and other professed free speech enthusiasts would be virtually unanimous in their opposition to the firing--especially given that KCRW immediately erased Loh's entire six-year archive from its Web site and issued a damage-control press release that included the creepy phrase "pre-emptive distancing." But you'd be wrong.

"Oh, please," KNX-AM news radio anchor Dave Williams wrote to LAradio.com. "The woman dropped an F-bomb on a microphone. We don't do that, period."

With the sole exception of satirist Harry Shearer, none of KCRW'S high-profile on-air personalities even sent Loh a note of support or regret. On the letters page of the L.A. Times and in the comments section of the local media weblog L.A. Observed, a surprising number of journalists thought the more appropriate response was to trash Loh's work and character.

Freelancer Dawna Kaufmann said the monologist was acting "like a victim, a martyr and a total sociopath"; colorful descriptions from others included "scatological gutter-mouth," "five-minute-a-week...