107.5 The River in Nashville has issued an apology for comments made about the community on the Woody and Jim show, which has been on the air for over two decades.
The hosts were discussing the recent Nashville tornado and how more deaths happened in Putnam County, despite Nashville being more densely populated. Comments were made about the differences between Nashville and its surrounding communities. Some of those comments led listeners to believe hosts were calling people in Putnam County uneducated.
Knox.com posted the exact comments from the hosts: “They (first responders) also said that they see more deaths in those areas because people don’t have as much education or money or resources to protect themselves. And if you think about the structure of the homes in more of those rural communities, a lot of them are pre-manufactured homes, so they don’t really have a safe place. If a tornado comes through, the whole house is going.”
And here’s what a listener thought about those comments, which she posted on Facebook:
“The comments that were made on your show about Putnam County were absolutely disgusting. The ‘uneducated’ people you are referring to were engineers, pastors, police officers, nurses, doctors, managers, many other occupations, but more importantly some of them were children.”
Here’s the station’s apology:
In the wake of the tragic tornado outbreak that claimed 24 lives across the mid-state and left thousands of our neighbors without their homes, we take our platform as a media outlet very seriously. We understand that our responsibility is not only to help our neighbors through volunteer efforts and donations, but to be a place where people who need help can be connected to those that are willing and able to provide it. On top of our efforts to collect supplies, which The Goodness Project will distribute to those in need, we’ve spent most of this week fielding calls and collecting information to share via our airwaves that can be meaningful to our listeners in this time of crisis.
And there were also some very well educated people who were affected by those storms. What a stupid thing to say. A tornado knows no grade transcripts. It affects smart and dull equally.
That’s not an apology!
Just fire the guys. More have been fired for a lot less, or nothing at all.
That was an apology?!?
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