During the October 22 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage asked: “Do you think a person on welfare has the right to vote? I don’t. Why should a person who is on public assistance maintain the right to vote? Tell me why. Where is it written that they should have the right to vote?” He added: “I support them, and they should have the same vote I do? That would be like saying an infant has the right to vote or an insane person has the right to vote. Why should a welfare recipient have the right to vote? They’re only gonna vote themselves a raise.”

Savage continued: “So if you get a demagogue like [Sen. Barack] Obama coming along, and he says to the welfare recipient, elect me, and I’ll make sure that we have trickle-up poverty, and the rich — so-called, that is anyone who works for a living — will give you more money, more welfare, of course you’re gonna vote for the demagogue Obama. See, if I was in charge, I’d pass a law which says, OK, you can’t support yourself for whatever reason, you’re on welfare, you lose the right to vote.”

Later in the broadcast, Savage again asked: “Do you think that people on welfare should lose the right to vote, as I do? Do you believe that that would be a fundament of democracy that if you lose the right — if you lose the ability to support yourself, for whatever reason, and you seek public assistance, you should, during that period of receiving public assistance, lose the right to vote?” He later stated: “You get back on the self-sufficiency, you get the right to vote. Then we’ll have a fair election in America. Otherwise, it’s all over. We have a communist nation either now or in the very near future.”

Savage: Kenya is going to move to America if ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ wins

The Racism That Consumes Michael Savage — PART 1

The Racism That Consumes Michael Savage — PART 2

As Media Matters for America has documented, on the October 21 broadcast of The War Room with Quinn & Rose, host Jim Quinn, while discussing the history of property rights in the United States, said: “Originally, if you didn’t own land, you didn’t vote, and there was a good reason for it: because those without property will always vote away the property of other people unto themselves, and that’s the beginning of the end.” Quinn added: “But, oh no, that was — that was just too mean-spirited.” Additionally, on the October 2 broadcast of his Minneapolis radio show, Chris Baker said, “I don’t think homeless people should vote. Frankly, in fact, I have to be very honest. I’m not that excited about women voting, to be honest.” Baker later added: “But that’s just me. I’m a pig, and that’s fine. All right? And we’ll see that, I’m sure, on a lame-ass website very soon. But I don’t think hobos ought to vote at all. They’re nuts. And I think that there needs to be a little more care in who votes.”

Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Savage’s show, claims that Savage is heard on more than 350 radio stations. The Savage Nation reaches at least 8.25 million listeners each week, according to Talkers Magazine, making it one of the most listened-to talk radio shows in the nation, behind only The Rush Limbaugh Show and The Sean Hannity Show….[ MORE ]

Editorial Reviews

From the yellowed columns of newsprint, Ms. Tucher . . . skillfully draws a contemporary moral. — New York Times Book Review

[Tucher] presents the colorful story of the early penny press with all the verve, intelligence, and humor it merits. — American Heritage

A deceptively complex book. . . . A readable, racy, and often funny study of an important aspect of antebellum social history. — American Historical Review

This well-written book is a valuable contribution to the literature on journalism in the nineteenth century. — Journal of the Early Republic

This is scholarship as solid as oak and history as timely as today’s tabloid titillation. — Bill Moyers

Product Description

Two notorious antebellum New York murder cases—a prostitute slashed in an elegant brothel and a tradesman bludgeoned by the brother of inventor Samuel Colt—set off journalistic scrambles over the meanings of truth, objectivity, and the duty of the press that reverberate to this day.

In 1833 an entirely new kind of newspaper—cheap, feisty, and politically independent—introduced American readers to the novel concept of what has come to be called objectivity in news coverage. The penny press was the first medium that claimed to present the true, unbiased facts to a democratic audience. But in Froth and Scum, Andie Tucher explores—and explodes—the notion that ‘objective’ reporting will discover a single, definitive truth.

As they do now, news stories of the time aroused strong feelings about the possibility of justice, the privileges of power, and the nature of evil. The prostitute’s murder in 1836 sparked an impassioned public debate, but one newspaper’s ‘impartial investigation’ pleased the powerful by helping the killer go free. Colt’s 1841 murder of the tradesman inspired universal condemnation, but the newspapers’ singleminded focus on his conviction allowed another secret criminal to escape. By examining media coverage of these two sensational murders, Tucher reveals how a community’s needs and anxieties can shape its public truths. The manuscript of this book won the 1991 Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation in American history.

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