Troubled Timing Takes Maher Beyond ‘Politically Incorrect’

When Bill Maher returned as host of his ABC late-night show, “Politically Incorrect,” the terrorist attacks in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area were 6 days old, and Maher--who had seen his midnight time slot preempted by round-the-clock news coverage--was ready to unburden himself.

If Maher didn’t understand that he was speaking to a changed America, the backlash he caused that night gave him a crash course--in the politics of speech at a time of fervent patriotism, in the skittishness of network TV during a national crisis and in the potential for a comment, after it orbits out into the media ether, to return in its most incendiary form.

Maher is not alone. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, the Washington Post reported this week, has received more than 10,000 angry phone calls and e-mails over comments uttered on the air in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks--comments that at first blush don’t seem terribly loaded. “The country looks to the president on occasions like this to be reassuring to the nation. Some presidents do it well, some presidents don’t.”

Soon after, syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh, tipped off by an e-mail, told his listeners that Jennings had questioned Bush’s character, fueling the backlash. Limbaugh has since issued an on-air retraction.

All last week, Maher found himself in deeper trouble: He had called the U.S. military cowardly and, by implication, the terrorists brave, according to accusations. He had outraged viewers and sponsors--Sears and FedEx pulled their advertising--and WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., a key market for something called “Politically Incorrect,” dropped the show temporarily.

Even Michael Eisner, the chairman of ABC’s corporate parent, Walt Disney Co., indicated his disapproval of Maher’s comments in a Saturday interview with The Times in which the executive addressed a host of more grave matters for his company, including revenue for Disney’s theme park, movie and television divisions.

And yet, to reconstruct the controversy is to see that it grew by chance and after the fact--building momentum by implication.

There was a relative crush of media backstage for Maher’s first show Sept. 17. The late-night talk show hosts were returning, point men for an industry looking to take its first furtive steps back to business as usual: entertaining the masses.

Maher danced with the unsentimental, fiery rhetoric that had brought him to this moment.

Maher used his opening remarks, for instance, to question the priorities of a country in which a band of terrorists elude airport security but not a Hollywood producer carrying “funny mushrooms” (a thinly veiled reference to “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, who was arrested earlier this year on drug charges at Burbank Airport).

One of the guests on the show, in which actors, pundits and the like engage in a kind of town meeting moderated by Maher, was Dinesh D’Souza, an author and former policy analyst during the Reagan administration.

“Bill, there’s another piece of political correctness I want to mention,” D’Souza said at one point. “And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.”

Maher: “Not true.”

D’Souza: “Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.”

Maher: “Exactly.”

D’Souza: “These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so--I mean, I’m all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn’t blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.”

Maher: “But also, we should--we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly. You’re right.”

There were a nine media outlets backstage, including The Times, but most wanted a quickie sound bite from Maher after the show ended.

Likewise, the exchange between Maher and D’Souza evidently didn’t raise concerns with Andrea Wong, ABC’s senior vice president of alternative series and specials, or with three watchdogs--two from ABC and one representing the show’s advertisers--who nightly monitor content on “Politically Incorrect.”

But from his home in Houston, Dan Patrick heard an angry and immoral TV personality going way too far. Patrick was used to watching “Politically Incorrect” and feeling his blood pressure rise. He describes himself as a Christian with a strong faith in God who has been married for 26 years.

Patrick is also a conservative talk-show host, and the next morning he went on the air at KSEV (700 AM) and urged his listeners to call Sears and FedEx (they were the two commercials he remembered seeing after the offending segment) and demand that they stop advertising on such a virulently un-patriotic show.

“The Constitution does guarantee free speech, but it doesn’t guarantee you a television show,” Patrick said this week. “This isn’t an issue of free speech; it’s an issue of stewardship.”

Lee Antonio, spokeswoman for Sears, says the calls started coming in Tuesday--around 50, most of them from Houston and many unfamiliar with the particulars. “People that called me didn’t even know the show’s name,” she said.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Sears, after reviewing a tape of the show and looking at a transcript, decided to pull its ads. (FedEx had already pulled its spots Tuesday.) It was a small ad buy, anyway, at a fringe time of the broadcast day, and Antonio wrote up a three-sentence press release meant only for the Houston media.

“While I was on the phone with the PR newswire manager, my phone’s ringing from New York,” Antonio said. “We think that another wire service picked it up and put it out nationwide.”

Sponsors routinely drop in and out of certain programs based on content concerns, but this case had an added kick to it.

As the story spread across the country, ABC, says Maher, asked him to issue a written statement of contrition (which he did) and to read that statement from a TelePrompTer on his show Wednesday night (which he would not). That Maher wouldn’t simply fall in line with his network came as no surprise to anyone close to the show; in his eight years on ABC, Maher has cultivated an image somewhere between Howard Beale and an obstinate comic star. In the current climate, this does not make him an ideal face for a network owned by Disney. But nor is Maher someone who is apt to apologize without issuing caveats until he’s stoking new arguments.

“He never says things he doesn’t believe to get attention or to get the show hyped, but as a person he’s fairly argumentative,” says Doug Wilson, a longtime staffer and former executive producer who has since left the show. “He’s not tactful .... It’s not that what Bill is saying is wrong; it’s that the point doesn’t need to be made right now.”

Maher’s defenders see him as the victim of his own personality and a witch hunt.

Indeed, they point out, Maher’s supposedly horrific comments were echoed in other places, including this week’s issue of New Yorker magazine, in which essayist and novelist Susan Sontag wrote of the terrorist attacks: “Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or the ‘free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

Maher’s crime, then, would seem to have less to do with what he said than where he said it.

ABC recently renewed “Politically Incorrect” for two years, and the show generally approaches 3 million viewers a night. The series is produced by Brad Grey Television and HBO Downtown Productions; though ABC airs the show, its executives are hardly around, say those who’ve worked behind the scenes.

Indeed, various sources close to the show say, “Politically Incorrect” lacks an advocate in upper management at the network, which would prefer a less abrasive personality following its stately news franchise, “Nightline.” (Wong, who oversees the show for ABC, did not respond to an interview request.) But would ABC go so far as to cancel him or temporarily take the show off the air?

“If the network wants to use this as an excuse because of the dire straits that they’re in, to use [Maher] as a scapegoat, it would backfire,” says an industry source. “I promise you it’s a mistake.”

Then again, ABC has stuck by the show in the only form that matters--by airing it.

On Wednesday night’s show, Maher began repairing the damage. “In no way was I ever intending, because I never think this way, to say that the men and women who defend our nation in uniform are anything but courageous and valiant, and I apologize,” he said. Maher went on to clarify that he had been making a political comment about past military actions.

If a lone radio host in Houston had fueled the controversy, Maher began to avail himself of the smorgasbord of media options to clarify his offending comments.

On Thursday, he appeared on six nationally syndicated radio talk shows and on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor.”

On Friday he did three more broadcast interviews--taping his own show early so he could appear that night on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

“It’s a war room; that was the mentality,” Maher said this week of his strategy, later adding that it’s a sign of the “technological age that we live in that one person can blow on a spark and create a bonfire.”

By Monday, WJLA was airing the show again, and Maher was boasting that the story had done a 360. Now, he said, he was morphing from scourge to 1st Amendment martyr, and he had a 5-inch-thick stack of letters and faxes to prove it.

“You’re the only [reporter] I’ve talked to today,” Maher said, after taping two shows Monday. “I’ve gotten more calls than ever from people saying, ‘You’ve gotta keep doing your show.”’