Hawaii radio station cancels Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated three hours of hate

Let’s hope that they’re just the first of many:

New West Broad­cast­ing announced today that it is dis­con­tin­u­ing the Rush Lim­baugh pro­gram on KPUA AM 670 in Hilo, Hawaii effec­tive immediately.

Chris Leonard, Pres­i­dent and Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of New West released the fol­low­ing state­ment this morning:

“We have always encour­aged spir­it­ed dis­cus­sion about nation­al and local issues on KPUA and from time to time those dis­cus­sions may be deemed by some to be objec­tion­able. We are strong believ­ers in the First Amend­ment and have rec­og­nized Mr. Lim­baugh­’s right to express opin­ions that often times dif­fer from our own, but it has nev­er been our goal to allow our sta­tion to be used for per­son­al attacks and intol­er­ance. The most recent inci­dent has crossed a line of decen­cy and a stan­dard that we expect of pro­gram­ming on KPUA whether it is local­ly pro­duced or a syn­di­cat­ed pro­gram like the Rush Lim­baugh Show.”

“While much of the nation­al debate regard­ing this issue is now being framed in polit­i­cal terms, the deci­sion for us is one of decen­cy and respon­si­bil­i­ty. Regard­less of one’s polit­i­cal views on the issue being dis­cussed, we feel the deliv­ery was degrad­ing and the con­tin­ued com­ments over sev­er­al days to be egre­gious. As a result, we are dis­con­tin­u­ing the Rush Lim­baugh pro­gram on KPUA effec­tive immediately.”

Lim­baugh has also lost near­ly a dozen nation­al adver­tis­ers so far as a result of the vicious slan­der he broad­cast­ed last week against George­town stu­dent San­dra Fluke: ProFlow­ers, AOL, Quick­en Loans, Sleep Train Mat­tress­es, Sleep Num­ber, Legal­Zoom, Car­bonite, Cit­rix, Bono­bos and Sears.

As Media Mat­ters has doc­u­ment­ed, Rush’s smear­ing of San­dra last week was hard­ly the first time he has sub­ject­ed some­one he dis­agreed with to degrad­ing com­men­tary. Lim­baugh­’s crude sex­ism has pol­lut­ed Amer­i­ca’s air­waves on a great many occa­sions pri­or to last Tues­day, Wednes­day, and Thursday.

Long ago, Rush Lim­baugh turned his show into a three-hour ver­sion of the “Two Minute Hate” depict­ed in George Orwell’s 1984. It is not a civ­il dis­cus­sion of the issues. It’s not com­e­dy. It’s just reg­u­lar­ly-broad­cast ver­bal abuse. There’s sim­ply no place for such malev­o­lence in a healthy democracy.

If you’re inter­est­ed in see­ing Rush Lim­baugh tak­en off the air in Seat­tle, con­sid­er doing as David Gold­stein has sug­gest­ed: con­tact the com­pa­nies that adver­tise local­ly on Rush’s show, which is broad­cast on KTTH, one of Bon­neville Inter­na­tion­al’s Seat­tle sta­tions, and ask them to stop sup­port­ing Rush’s hate speech. Sev­en oth­er com­pa­nies already have.