All You Need Is Hate

By Richard Zoglin

To think some people still get exercised over Rush Limbaugh. They have obviously never run across Dr. Herbert Poinsett. A square-jawed, balding former chiropractor, Poinsett is host of a nationally seen talk show based in Tampa, Florida. With Nazi and Confederate flags as backdrop, he rails against everything from the Jewish-controlled media to "black bucks" taking over our cities. A typical Poinsett point: serial killers are mostly white because "blacks don't have the brains to be serial killers."

Nor are fans of Oprah and Geraldo likely to be prepared for Ta-Har, a self- described high priest of the Black Israelites. He too has a talk show, It's Time to Wake Up, which airs every other Friday night in New York's Westchester County. But his tactics are, shall we say, more direct. On one show he wielded a baseball bat and delivered a prophecy: "We're going to be beating the hell out of you white people . . . We're going to take your little children and dash them against the stones."

Poinsett and Ta-Har represent the lunatic fringe of the talk-show spectrum. But they are far from lonely voices. White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremists have found a comfortable, if not quite welcoming, home on cable's public-access channels. In 1991 the Anti-Defamation League counted 57 different "hate shows" across the country. The audience for these crudely produced and crudely reasoned programs is relatively tiny. But the virulence of their message has roused protests from New York City to Pocatello, Idaho, and launched a classic battle between community standards and First Amendment rights.

A rundown of the hottest shows on the hate-TV circuit:

-- Race and Reason, anchored by Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance, is the godfather of these programs. Produced in Southern California, the nine-year-old show is seen in 49 markets, according to Metzger. The no-frills talk format provides a forum for Metzger's white- supremacist views, as well as those of guests like Marty Cox of the skinhead band Extreme Hatred, who snarled in one recently taped show, "We're not gonna walk around the streets and let some nigger come and beat us up." Says Metzger: "We reach many more people than you could ever expect by having a rally or standing on a street corner."

-- Poinsett's show, inspired by Metzger's and also called Race and Reason, is even more extreme. An unabashed neo-Nazi, Poinsett asserts that "America is becoming darker and dumber every day" and considers Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler "the greatest white men who ever lived." When his show began running in New York City in January, viewer protests forced the program's local sponsor to withdraw it. Poinsett was appalled. "I am a political dissident," he says. "The First Amendment was meant for people like me."

-- Airlink, which emanates from Mississippi, propagates its "pro-majority" views in somewhat more sedate fashion. "We don't use four-letter words, and there's no hollering or yelling," says Richard Barrett, 49, a New York-born lawyer who heads the right-wing Nationalist Movement and is Airlink's producer and host. There are, however, plenty of approving words for neo-Nazi groups and whites who arm themselves against violent minorities. Barrett, who says his show airs in 60 markets, is the most litigious of the hate-TV crowd. He | has sued the city of Houston over a $100 fee it charges to non-locally produced access programs, and is waging a legal battle in Boston over a string of roadblocks he claims the cable company has put in his path.

These hate shows are generally protected by the First Amendment. In addition, the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 requires that public- access channels be uncensored (except for obscenity) and available to all. Even Ta-Har's antiwhite tirades were not, in the view of lawyers for TCI Cable of Westchester, inflammatory enough to outweigh his right to free speech. Some municipalities have fought back by banning non-locally produced shows on public-access channels or requiring that such shows have a local sponsor.

In the end, however, most cable and city officials simply grit their teeth and tolerate these programs -- and often encourage opposing groups to produce their own shows in response. In a perverse way, hate programs can even draw a community together. "Shows like these can trigger animosities, but they certainly do not cause them," says Robert Purvis, administrative director of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence. "Public access is potentially far more valuable in improving intergroup relations than it is in harming them."

With reporting by Paul Krueger/San Diego, Scott Norvell/Atlanta and David E. Thigpen/New York