Krueger's comments may not have been intentional and he could be the the kind of person who loves cute puppies, but it still doesn't change the fact that what he said was, in its way, racist. It's especially a little weird considering this is all going on in the Bay Area, the bastion of "tolerance," "open-mindedness" and intolerance of intolerance. Is it just blowback over the suckiness of the team? Or maybe its just one big huge anti-reaction to all the PC wars fought in our little neck of the woods on a daily basis. After all, it's almost impossible to sneeze in this town without having somebody lecture you on some sort of –ism you've just committed and how you've somehow empowered the, take your pick, patriarchy/neoconservative militarists/multinational corporations.
Anyways, for those still looking for an explanation on the firings of the KNBR Three, P.J. Corkery in the Examiner has a pretty good bead on what the what was. The villain in all this? Not Felipe, not Krueger, but Janet Jackson. Follow the bouncing ball here -- Janet Jackson's boob pops out, a nation screams "what about the children?" and the Republicans go into their quadrennial crusade to make the world safe for "family values." As a result, the FCC starts fining everything.
Enter the corporate overloard of KNBR, Susquehanna Media, who also owns KFOG and the Bone. Susquehanna Media it turns out, is owned by Pfaltzgraff Pottery -- what one has to do with the other we have no idea, but there you have it. Pfaltzgraff Pottery is being flattened by Tom Friedman's flat world globalization machine and so Pfaltzgraff Pottery puts Susquehanna Media up for sale. What's the last thing a company trying to sell radio stations needs? A radio station under investigation by the FCC for offensive material. Ergo and ipso facto, good bye Krueger, Agnew and Rhein, victims of this ever changin in which we live in.
So, if you want to get mad, don't blame Felipe, blame faceless corporate media congolemerations! Cause if there's one thing we can all rally around, it's hating on them.