Conservative radio station bashes its owner

You gotta’ hand it to our friends at WPTF radio here in Raleigh. The station’s afternoon program featuring Bill LuMaye (a personable and friendly guy who has kindly invited folks from Policy Watch and the Justice Center on as guests with great regularity even as he occasionally tries to treat us like piñatas) took things to a new level yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday, Bill’s show featured a Pope-Civitas summer intern who is part of the group’s dishonest and inaccurate character assassination attempt against new UNC president Tom Ross. According to the intern and – it seems, I fear – Bill, North Carolinians should be aghast that Tom was once the E.D. at the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. According to the intern, all of ZSR’s historic funding for causes like LGBT equality, reproductive freedom and, of course, everyone’s favorite whipping child, ACORN, evidence a radical, leftist bent.

Interestingly, what the intern and Bill failed to mention (aside from the fact that Tom Ross is a caring, committed, straight-shooting, hard-working man – a person of vision and integrity and one of the best leaders our state has produced in recent decades) was that the owner of WPTF, Don Curtis, highlights his own past affiliation with ZSR in his own biography!

Now, I want to say it publicly right here that I know Don Curtis. Don is a good guy with whom we sometimes agree and sometimes disagree. He’s had Chris and I both on his own shows on several occasions. But he sure ain’t no radical leftist. And I know he wouldn’t be trumpeting his own links to ZSR if he thought the group fit such a bill.

So, you have to admit – the folks at WPTF have chutzpah. Not only are they willing to invite uninformed interns on the air to trash great and accomplished people in the service of a right-wing agenda, they’re also willing to trash vitally important organizations with whom the man that signs their checks boasts of his affiliation!

Now that’s pretty gutsy.