Joan's Journal

I may be the last person on the Web to hear this, so pardon me if I'm redundant. There's this blogger, calls himself Spocko, claims to get 15 hits a day, and he decided to do something about the right-wing radio station KSFO-AM. It seems that certain of the, ahem, talk radio personalities on KSFO were starting to advocate things like killing protesters by stomping them to death, mass murder of Muslims, and so on. (There was one snippet proposing torture in such explicit detail that it was technically pornographic in a nonconsensual sadomasochism sort of way.) Spocko started sending emails to KSFO advertisers, attaching clips of this stuff from the station and asking questions along the lines of "Do you really want your products or your good name associated with this kind of thing?"

He got results. Advertisers have been leaving KSFO in a steady drip, with a big one, Visa, pulling their ads as of mid-December. Almost immediately, Spocko and his ISP got the predictable scary letters from KSFO's parent company, ABC/Disney. The ISP got scared and shut him down, though he now seems to be back up (at http://www.spockosbrain.com/.) More details of the story at http://mediamatters.org/items/200701090004. He is now braced for the Big Lawsuit, although he retains his sense of humor about the situation. In his own words, "Am I scared? Hell yes. They can easily squish me like a bug and tie me up in legal battles for the rest of my natural life (and Vulcans live a long time)..."

Excuse me. I have to go donate something to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which is giving him free legal support.