Karl Vincent Frisch

The Boston Globe

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

After several days of criticism for inviting Bernard McGuirk onto its airwaves, WRKO yesterday canceled the appearance by the former producer for shock jock Don Imus.

McGuirk was slated to begin a three-day stint tomorrow as a guest on a talk show hosted by former House speaker Tom Finneran - an appearance that station officials had said was a tryout for the man who first said the word “ho” in the on-air conversation that led to Imus’s downfall.

George Regan, a spokesman for Entercom Communications, the parent company of WRKO, declined to say why the invitation was rescinded. But over the weekend, criticism of the station mounted after statements from a 1997 interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” surfaced. In the interview, Imus was quoted using a racial slur to say that part of McGuirk’s job was to tell jokes about blacks on “Imus in the Morning.”

“After careful deliberation, [WRKO] decided that it would not be appropriate for Bernie to be a cohost at WRKO at this time,” Regan said.

Dan Kennedy, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University and blogs on the local media scene, applauded the station for reversing course.

“To actually bring McGuirk into Boston, and to pair him with a guy who - although he’s not doing that well on the ratings certainly, has some class and some dignity - was an awful decision, and I’m glad they’re not going to do it,” he said.

On April 4, McGuirk called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “hard-core hos.” Imus responded by calling them “nappy-headed hos,” inciting a public outcry that cost Imus and McGuirk their jobs.

News that McGuirk would cohost on “Finneran’s Forum,” as the station sought a permanent partner for Finneran, became a national news story Friday, and the radio station faced criticism from media watchers.

McGuirk’s appearance was seen by criticsas a ratings play, since WRKO’s four-hour morning drive time slot had fallen over the past year from seventh in the market to ninth for the January to March time period, according to research firm Arbitron. Finneran took over the slot in mid-February.

Kennedy’s blog, Media Nation, panned the decision, and Adam Reilly’s media blog at The Boston Phoenix cited the 1997 “60 Minutes” interview with Imus. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Finneran told his bosses at WRKO that he doesn’t want McGuirk’s help?” he wrote. The comment from “60 Minutes” was also referenced by Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson on Saturday’s editorial pages.

Sadiki Kambon, an activist from Roxbury, had demanded a meeting with WRKO leadership and said he had planned to show up at the station tomorrow morning with other community leaders at 10. Kambon said he got a call yesterday from Julie Kahn, vice president and marketing manager for Entercom, telling him that McGuirk had been pulled from the show.

“This is excellent - they made the right decision,” he said. “We were not going to stand for this.”

In an interview last week, Finneran said he thought McGuirk was a “talented guy” and said that he looked forward to doing the show with him just as he had with other cohosts, including a Boston Herald editor, Joe Sciacca, and legal analyst Wendy Murphy. But he described his ideal show as one that seemed to veer far from McGuirk’s usual banter.

“I really want to make sure this is a show you’re comfortable listening to … but with your mother and your daughter in the car, nobody’s cringing,” he said.

Finneran would not comment yesterday.

“What’s important here is that WRKO is taking some degree of responsibility for the content of their broadcasts - something we don’t see often enough in the current media landscape,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters, a journalistic watchdog organization that helped elevate the issue into the spotlight by posting the April 4 transcript.

“I’m surprised; I thought ‘RKO would probably bring him in, put him on the air, and see what kind of response they got from not just the black community, but from people citywide. I’m somewhat relieved,” said the Rev. Bruce Wall. “In the city of Boston, while we’re still trying to heal racially, to bring this person in would have started something that ‘RKO would not want attached to them.”