EEOC Head Enters KFI Talk Show Fray

In an emotional statement, the severely disabled chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Friday he opposes disciplining Los Angeles radio station KFI for a talk show that debated whether a TV news anchorwoman should abort her pregnancy because her disability could be inherited by her baby.

Evan J. Kemp Jr. said that although he was “appalled and sickened” by callers to the program who said KCBS anchor Bree Walker had no right to become pregnant, the right of free speech should shield the station from Federal Communications Commission action.

Walker and her co-anchor husband, Jim Lampley, and more than 20 organizations for the disabled complained to the FCC over the July 22 broadcast and asked for an investigation. They said the agency should examine whether the station and its owner, Cox Broadcasting Corp., should lose their license, be fined or reprimanded for the broadcast.

FCC regulations require stations to “operate in the public interest” and “afford a reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views.” The couple charged the broadcast attacked Walker’s integrity without inviting them to appear and harassed callers who attempted to express contrary views.

But Jonathan Emord, senior litigation counsel for the Institute for Justice, the organization that urged Kemp to issue his statement, said “the future of talk radio” is threatened by the complaint. He said it has “a chilling effect” on public expression on the airwaves.

Five weeks after the broadcast, Walker had the baby, who has the same genetic condition as his mother--ectrodactylism, in which the bones of the hands and feet are fused. There was a 50% chance that the baby would have the condition.

The wheelchair-bound Kemp, who was stricken with a rare polio-like disease--Kugelberg-Welander--when he was 12, said he was speaking out not as the EEOC chairman, but as a “severely disabled person” with a condition that may be inherited.

Kemp, who said he plans to write the FCC, said he is “adamant that radio shows, TV shows and other forms of grass-roots discussions are the only forums which will save others like me.”

Noting that the majority of callers to the talk show and the moderator seemed to think that Walker had no right to become pregnant and should abort if she did, Kemp said his family “to this day feels the same way about me.

“They are adamant that, were there a test at the time to show that I would have this neuromuscular disease, they would have aborted me,” Kemp said. “They are wrong. Although I am severely disabled and use a wheelchair and personal care attendant to get me up and dressed in the morning, I adore the fact that I am alive. I love what I can achieve--far apart from the work I do at the EEOC.”

“We must take the discussion away from the doctors, ethics specialists and attorneys and put it out on the streets,” Kemp said.

“A doctor might well tell a parent to abort someone like me--or even someone like Bree Walker Lampley,” he said. But once the issue is discussed thoroughly in the media, churches and homes “I have a stronger chance to live. The Bree Walker Lampley controversy was an early start to such discussions.”

Paul Steven Miller, litigation director for the Western Law Center for the Handicapped, attorneys for Walker and Lampley and others who brought the complaint, said the KFI program was “not a thorough discussion of the issue,” but instead, “an attack on Bree Walker’s integrity.”

There would have been no complaint if the dialogue had been thorough instead of “a manipulative and hateful discussion,” Miller said.