Michael Savage: Crunchy hippie liberal
What leads someone to become a fire-breathing right-wing talk show host? Answer: A Ph.D. from Berkeley in nutritional ethnomedicine. Seriously.
The current issue of The New Yorker has a very interesting profile of Michael Savage [registration required]. Although the magazine’s profiles of conservatives often degenerate into caricature, this one is surprisingly fair-minded, even affectionate.
As for Savage’s origins, we find out that in 1978 Michael Alan Weiner
earned a degree that sounds like something from a conservative parody of liberal university culture: a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California at Berkeley. As Michael A. Weiner, [Savage] built a small empire as a consultant and the author of a string of crunchy advice books: “Plant a Tree”; “Earth Medicine, Earth Food”; “The Art of Feeding Children Well”; “Maximum Immunity”.
While the article was being researched, Savage challenged the author, Kelefa Sanneh, to be more objective than other liberal journalists:
Over the years, Savage has noticed that his disdain for the mainstream media is weidely reciprocated…So when he received an e-mail from a journalist asking for an interview, he was deeply suspicious. He read the e-mail on the air — he kept the writer anonymous, and didn’t mention that the request came from The New Yorker — and then asked his listeners, “Should I do the interview or not?”…About a week later, Savage revisited the topic — “my continuing correspondence with a big-shot magazine writer.” He quoted the latest exchanges, along with his tart response, in which he asked, “Why must all of you in the extreme media paint everyone you disagree with as demonic? Why is the homosexual agenda so important to the midstream media?”
Surprisingly, this approach seems to have paid off. Among the striking passages in Sanneh’s profile is this one:
The immoderate quotes meticulously catalogued by the liberal media watchdog site mediamatter.org are accurate but misleading, insofar as they reduce a willfully erratic broadcast to a series of political brickbats.
Never thought I’d read that in The New Yorker.
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
3 Responses to “Michael Savage: Crunchy hippie liberal”
Thanks for an interesting article D.A. And your remark on your otherpost about reading financials while wearing tefelin, made me laugh about the dedication to reading such.
Just a note here for readers: Savage's university degree, despite the words that are sometimes unfamiliar to mainstream– nutritional ethnomedicine–means the study of how to feed and nourish the poor across the world from resourced availaible to them. The wars and conquests, the tsunamis, earthquakes and other devastations of the land and displacements of the peope had and still causes people to be without aerable land, or without money …. and/or without enough manpower and unbroken tools and live animals, say milk for instance… the people try to go on too without memory carried by those who died or were murdered– those who knew about taking care of the animals and the land/ how to/ where to/ when to.
To help restore and offer ways of helping those devastated was the study Savage undertook. I didnt know this. To me he was always the only part of himself that presently showed above ground on the radio… this screaming angry voice passed over fast.
thanks,
dr.e
Don't know much about the background of this Michael Savage–it sounds academically impressive. All I know is that when I accidentally scan past the stations he broadcasts on, all I hear is vile, obscene, odious commentary about everyone and everything. A sad, bitter man. I quickly hit the button to get past his obscene rhetoric.
I also understand that, because of his hate-filled speech (yes, free speech) he has been banned from entering Great Britain
In the course of his journalistic due diligence, I wonder if Kelefa Sanneh reviewed these damning articles: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/arti… and http://www.fair.org/extra/0307/savage-anti-semi…. Please email me at Jeff@Silberman.com should you wish to hear the audioclips of the Jew-baiting rhetoric quoted in these articles so that you may judge whether these “immoderate quotes” are “accurate but misleading.”