Michael Savage, San Francisco Weekly

SAVAGED

Lefty Paper Digs Deep, Skewers Popular Host





*** Site Update Below ***

After a lengthy expose on his background was released this week, we doubt the "Savage Nation" is a very happy place to live right now.

Published in the San Francisco Weekly, a left- wing "alternative" newspaper, it details syndicated talker Michael Savage's past, going back to his quasi- beatnik days.

While some of the story's details aren't new, it does fill in a number of gaps in our understanding of the infamously hot- headed host's colorful previous life. Especially interesting is that his onetime involvement with the San Francisco- based counterculture movement appears to have been far more extensive than previously reported.


While one would expect a lefty "City" paper to skewer Savage (there doesn't seem to have been much of an attempt to find supporters or defenders of the popular host, for example), the piece is worth reading for the insight it sheds on what brought the man to where he is today.

Just remember to keep your media bias stink- detector set to "high" for this one: it has a nasty habit of attempting to tie his ideological conversion to mental illness.


From Ron Russell's piece:

Three years ago, after he was canned by MSNBC for telling a caller to his fledgling cable TV show to "get AIDS and die, you pig," some people were saying that the combative, arch-conservative talk-show host and author of red-meat political diatribes was washed up. But that was four New York Times best-sellers ago. His latest book, The Political Zoo, a kind of walk through the jungle of mostly liberal political animals that this unlikeliest of San Francisco provocateurs loves to hate, hit bookstore shelves in the spring....


....It's a neat trick for a once mild-mannered botanist and North Beach hipster who counted none other than Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the late Allen Ginsberg among his pals when he was still using his real name: Michael Weiner.

Few things about Savage's pre-radio past could have presaged his rise as perhaps the far right's most vocal on-air ambassador. Not his adulation of Ginsberg. Not the fact that he once trolled the streets of Greenwich Village and, later, North Beach, in a beret. Or that the staunch anti-abortionist's first wife had two abortions during their marriage. And certainly not the fact that he was once Timothy Leary's gatekeeper at the LSD experimenter's farm.

His daily three-hour program has added dozens of new stations in the last 18 months. His screeds continue to fly off bookstore shelves. Sources say that his unique syndication deal through Talk Radio Network — the Oregon outfit that also produces talker Laura Ingraham and a bevy of lesser-known conservatives — enables Savage to rake in several millions of dollars annually from the radio show alone.

With all of that going for him, one might conclude that the reclusive and media-suspicious former beatnik lover and author of herbal medicine books would be a happy camper. But Savage, 64, appears to feel too underappreciated to be happy for long....


.....That the archconservative radio icon should be based in America's most famously liberal big city is largely an accident of circumstance. Back in 1994, irked over his inability to find a publisher for a controversial book he had written called Immigrants and Epidemics, which sought to link the spread of infectious diseases to U.S. immigration policy, Savage recorded a mock radio talk show on tape. He sent it to 400 stations nationwide. Of the three that responded, KGO, in San Francisco, offered him a job.

To see the rest of the story, click here.

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Drawing: SF Weekly