Supremacist Talk Show Is Broadcast on Torrance Cable : Media: The City Council asks the city attorney if it can stop future broadcasts of White Aryan Resistance tapes on public access TV.

Stunned to learn that Torrance’s local cable access channel has been airing a controversial talk show produced by white supremacist Tom Metzger, the City Council has asked the city attorney to explore whether it can prevent future broadcasts of the series.

Officials at Torrance Community Television’s Channel 59 said the show, “Race and Reason--Aryan Women,” was repeated 12 times during the past two weeks. Aired intermittently at 10:30 p.m., it featured an interview with the head of the Aryan Women’s League, an affiliate of Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance.

“It was just a pro-white talk show where various guests talked about what’s happening to white people in America,” said Paul Smith of Torrance, the 20-year-old apprentice electrician and self-described “former skinhead” who requested that the tape be aired.

But Councilman Dan Walker and Mayor Katy Geissert condemned the show.

“It’s anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-Asian and totally repugnant,” Geissert said in an interview Wednesday.

“I’m going to do everything I can to keep it off the air,” Walker said. “It’s worse than any pornographic film. It’s pornography of the mind.”

Aired in at least 50 cities, including several in Orange County and the West San Fernando Valley, Metzger’s series--like his telephone hot lines and WAR newspaper--has been criticized as advocating violence toward minorities and Jews. This week, a Portland, Ore., jury ordered Metzger and his followers to pay $12.5 million to the family of a black man beaten to death by skinheads allegedly incited by Metzger.

Geissert said the tape aired in Torrance made no mention of violence but did include numerous racial and ethnic slurs.

Metzger’s views have been criticized as racist in the extreme, but he has contended that his broadcasts and publications are protected under his First Amendment right to free speech. City Atty. Kenneth Nelson said he had not yet settled on a legal opinion but acknowledged that trying to keep “Race and Reason” off the air would be “touchy.”

Mark Geddes, production supervisor for Channel 59, said the guidelines for the city-run station require it to air any broadcast requested by a Torrance resident as long as it isn’t pornographic.

“There isn’t much we can do to deny a program unless it’s totally obscene,” he said. “If we try, it’s considered censorship.”

Geddes said the station has never turned down a request and has aired a number of controversial programs, including one this spring in which members of a nudist camp were interviewed naked on the air.

Smith said he brought the tape to Channel 59 after ordering it from an ad he saw in the WAR newspaper, to which he subscribes. He said the tape was previewed by the station’s staff, who “were real nice about it and said there wasn’t anything offensive in it.”

Although the current tape has run its two-week course, Smith said he intends to ask the station to broadcast every tape in the 80-tape series and will sue if he is turned away.

“I think it needs to be aired everywhere,” he said. “You got your black shows, your Hispanic shows, your Jewish shows, but there’s no shows on any TV network that talk positive about white people.”