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  • 2016-09-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Michael Savage Removed from the Airwaves for Discussing Clinton's Health (en)
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  • On 26 September 2016 rumors began circulating that popular conservative political commentator Michael Savage had been fired, replaced by a liberal host, or forcibly removed from the radio airwaves by operatives of Hillary Clinton after he published the following tweets: Savage maintained that he had been abruptly cut off the air as he was discussing Hillary Clinton's alleged health issues and suggested a connection between those events: Savage's popular The Savage Nation is a nationally syndicated one broadcast throughout the U.S. by affiliate stations of the Westwood One network. What happened on the day in question was that one of the stations that airs Savage's program, WABC in New York (which has the largest audience share of any station that carries The Savage Nation), opted to preempt his show — apparently without notifying Savage in advance — in favor of wall to wall coverage of that day's first presidential debate provided by local hosts Curtis Sliwa and Ron Kuby, reporting live from the scene at nearby Hofstra University: Many Twitter users saw only Savage's tweets and inferred that the host had been removed from his show and/or punished. Although WABC did not address angry Twitter users, Westwood One published a stream of identical responses explaining Savage's program had simply been preempted by one station in favor of debate coverage and had immediately returned to the air on that station the following day: Indeed, the very next day WABC published a tweet promoting Savage's program, demonstrating that his show hadn't been pulled by the station for anything other than one day's special event coverage: Bart Tessler, Westwood One's Eexecutive Vice President for News and Talk, issued the following statement about the issue: Adding to the confusion was the fact that some kind of technical glitch resulted in a portion of the third hour of Savage's program being replaced by a repeat of a previous show on the day in question: In response to our query, a media rep for Westwood One told us that a technical issue briefly necessitated the airing of re-run programming for a few minutes during the third hour of Savage's program until the problem was resolved. (en)
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