I’ve always marveled at how conservative fire-breathers are able to hawk the notion of a liberal-dominated media when right-wing pundits dominate most of the talk shows you see on television and hear on radio. Last week, I experienced first hand how some of them keep liberal voices off the airwaves by manipulating weak-kneed producers. I also got further insight into what complete cowards and wimps a lot of conservative pundits are, and why the liberal pundits who are up against them on the talk shows are usually so bland. The bland types are the only ones the conservatives will appear with, a la Fox’s Hannity & Colmes.

Last week, a producer at Boston’s WBUR, an NPR station–the same NPR accused by the right as being at the forefront of the "liberal media agenda"–was so eager to get in touch with me that she contacted my editors at both New York Press and Newsday with urgent missives, and also sent an email via my website. She was calling from a popular program called "The Connection," hosted by Dick Gordon, and wanted me to participate on a show about same-sex marriage the following day. The other guests would be writer E.J. Graf and National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg.

Now, for those who don’t know it–and my email shows that many do not–Goldberg is the son of the notorious, sleazoid web maven, Lucianne Goldberg, the scheming literary agent who helped expose Bill Clinton’s sex life. If not for his mother’s standing among those on the right–and the favors she had stockpiled for being a tool of the anti-Clinton machine–Jonah would probably be punching data in a terminal somewhere, rather than sitting on talk shows as a pundit.

As the producer from WBUR was trying to reach me, I was on the air myself, doing my own daily three-hour radio program, and didn’t get the messages until 4 p.m. I returned the calls and accepted. She planned to make arrangements for me to go to an NPR studio in Manhattan, but also inquired if I could do it from my studio at Sirius Satellite. She was set on having me on the show.

She called back at 6:30 to inform me that I was "off the hook" for the show: Conservative pundit Goldberg wouldn’t appear with me. The producer noted that she doesn’t usually let a guest "dictate" who the other guests are, but it was late and thus hard to find another conservative. As I wrote in a letter about the incident to Jim Romenesko’s media news page on the Poynter Institute’s site last week, that sounded pretty bogus. Finding a conservative pundit to do a radio program is about as difficult as finding a drag queen at gay pride.

What turned the macho Goldberg into a yellow belly? What could send him running from a gay columnist? According to the producer, Goldberg implied that we’d had some words–even though Goldberg and I have never spoken or even exchanged so much as an email. He did "admit," she said, that I am a "powerful" gay columnist (yes, I laughed at that one), but that
I had put out "misinterpretations" of his work.

I’m guessing that one of those "misinterpretations" was a column wherein I criticized him during the Washington, DC, sniper attacks. He had floated the totally unfounded idea that the suspects were really gay lovers, and then gleefully called the capture of the suspects a possible "threefer" (because they were Muslim, African-American and, in the minds of Goldberg and his fellow right-wing smear artists, possibly homosexual).

The other "misinterpretation" might have been my column exposing one of his editors at the Washington Times, Robert Stacy McCain, as a member of the League of the South, a racist Southern secessionist group. Goldberg had just spent a week piously calling on Trent Lott to step down as Senate majority leader because of his racially insensitive remarks, and then found himself exposed as working for an out-and-out racist. (The folks at the American Prospect’s blog called on Goldberg to follow his own advice and step down from the Washington Times, but he did not–nor did he even respond.)

Here is a stellar example of how liberal voices are shut out of the so-called liberal media at the behest of cowardly conservative columnists who spend much of their time railing that the media favors liberals. Even more curious was learning from the producer that Goldberg doesn’t like my journalism or my "tactics"–particularly around the issue of outing. How supremely ironic, I replied, given that he is the child of the salacious Lucianne, whom he’s defended.

The producer’s response? Who is Lucianne Goldberg? (Yes, more evidence of that well-informed, agenda-driven liberal media.)

After my letter appeared on Romenesko’s page, Goldberg responded on the National Review’s blog, the Corner:

"[Signorile’s] right," he admitted, caught red-handed. "I wouldn’t [appear on the show with him]. I didn’t want to do the show in the first place but I agreed to and so I was willing to honor my obligation. Then the producer told me late in the day that Signorile would be on with me. And I said, screw it I’m not doing it. My reason: Signorile is an ass."

Goldberg has the right to refuse to appear with me or anyone else, but if someone being an "ass" is a good reason not to be appear on tv with them, then he should just pack and go home, considering who they put on talk shows these days. This is one point where we agree: "[N]ext time the opportunity comes up," he wrote, "I guess I’ll say yes to appearing with him, because if I set a policy of never appearing with asses I would rarely do media and lord only knows how many liberals would refuse to appear with me."

It is the NPR station that is most egregious here, for letting him dictate the show. The next time, I imagine, Goldberg will make sure his demand isn’t let out of the bag, and I’d bet that the NPR producer is in a bit of trouble today. But, at the very least, it’s a satisfying consolation that, every once in while, you can shine a bright light on the doings of these people and watch them scamper like a horde of roaches.