Talk Show Host Randi Rhodes Explains Her Injury On Her Show
October 19th, 2007
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Yours truly is on a monster drive from San Diego in Southern California to the Sacramento area in Northern California — and yesterday got to hear the opening of the Randi Rhodes show.
Unless you were on Venus, the news cycle and the blogosphere were peppered earlier this week with a report stemming from comments made by one of Randi Rhodes’ colleagues (Air America talk show hosts) that the progressive talk radio’s popular afternoon host had been mugged while in New York City, possibly by someone with a political axe to grind. This wasn’t the first story involving a talk show host who was injured over the years…but it proved the most dubious in the end.
After the report circulated and blossomed into an ideological blog firestorm — with the tone of some (but NOT all) blog posts related to whether they agreed with Rhodes politically or not — news stories surfaced that there in fact had been no mugging and never was a police report. Rhodes’ lawyer denied there was a mugging too. It remained a strange story.
Yesterday, on her show, Rhodes went through what she said was the chronology, about how she was in NYC and was smoking a cigarette when she believes she was somehow pushed and wound up face down with many of her teeth smashed and her face a mess. According to Rhodes, she had no idea what happened, no concrete details of how she wound up face down on the pavement with bits of her teeth around her and she told her employer that she had been mugged and had broken teeth and would not be in the next day.
Sub host John Elliot then made his (in)famous comments suggesting Rhodes may have been hurt by someone on the right, a charge which was picked up by a blog which was widely linked to online…and by a zillion weblogs. (Elliot later issued an apology for going on the air and stating that assumption). News stories popped up about something happened to Rhodes.
Rhodes seemed most irked yesterday at the fact that a friend called her and told her to turn on TV and the Internet and that she did only to discover it was being said with certainty that she had been brutally mugged in New York City and that right wingers likely did it. She was aghast because no one had interviewed her and she herself had no proof that anyone on the right was involved or that she had indeed been mugged.
She found herself pursued by news and media photographers who camped out near her place and wanted a photo of her and her injuries, she said. And she seemed most angry that no media types ever asked her how she was feeling and wished her well — but only saw her as a kind of media commodity. They only wanted to get a photo of her injuries. One, she said, even asked her doorman if there was a secret list that would allow her to get up into Rhodes’ room.
Rhodes said it was a lesson to her in how the modern media works — stories go out with no confirmation written by reporters who don’t even ask how she is doing and the blogs go wild (but she expressed thanks to blogs who wished her well and seemed concerned over her health). She said she still has no real idea of how really it all happened.
Meanwhile, if you do Google Searches you’ll see there are other versions of what some say happened — all speculative, all using blind sources.
And its interesting to note that these blind sources that offer uncharitable explanations online as to what happened are people who seemingly don’t like Rhodes’ views. Everything is now so politicized in America that she is given the benefit of the doubt by those who agree with her, by some who don’t but there is a segment that will automatically offer theories that could be considered almost slanderous if offered about someone who was a non-public figure. It’s all part of the automatic discredit-those-with-whom-you-disagree style of American politics that has permeated the entire culture.
There are also other rumors and genuine speculation bubbling in the background — but that’s the nature of the infomedia beast.
And for now (unless a news organization or a well-funded supermarket tabloid picks up on it and says otherwise) the operative explanation of what happened is Rhodes: she believes she was somehow bumped or pushed from behind, fell down forcefully right on her face, let her employer know she thought she was mugged but never filed a police report, was aghast at media and blogosphere reaction and the way it mushroomed into a story stated with near certainty about an ideological attack -and she was back on the air after painful and extensive emergency dental surgery.
FOOTNOTE: Yours truly barely can post from this location so my own posts will be limited today and won’t appear until much later.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 6:24 am and is filed under Celebrities, Media, News, MSM, Journalism, Progressives, Republicans, Democrats, Politics, Entertainment, Conservatives, Liberals, Internet News Media, Media Criticism, Blogging. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
