South Florida Liberal Talk Host Neil Rogers Retires

Neil Rogers retired from his show on Miami's WQAM on Monday. This came as a bit of a shock to his fans who were expecting Rogers to retire at the end of his current contract with the station that was set to expire in 2013. Rogers has been at war with QAM's management for many years. Lately things have been getting more heated between station manager Joe Bell and Rogers, culminating in the firing of the show's long time producer and substitute host Jorge Rodriguez.

I'll miss the show quite a bit. Not only was he the best talk host in radio, he was a much needed liberal voice in a market deeply vulnerable to propaganda. To say he handed Florida to Obama in 2008 is overstating it, but Rogers was the first person in the media to predict Barack Obama would become president. His influential voice ferociously advocating for Obama and against the grave-robbing neocons for more than 18 months on what was consistently the most highly rated talk show in Miami helped the cause big time.

Neil's legacy extends far beyond that. In the days after Shock and Awe--long before the Downing Street memo was well know, long before we knew there would be no WMD found in Iraq, long before the American body count hit a thousand--Neil was denouncing the invasion and calling it another Vietnam. When hostile callers mocked him with polls that said over seventy-percent of the American people supported the war, Rogers bellowed, "I wouldn't care if I was the only schmuck in America that thought it was wrong! It's freaking wrong!" He spent much of the rest of the Bush administration passionately reading great anti-war and anti-Bush op-eds on the air from the likes of Cenk Uygur, Greg Palast, Doug Thompson and many others. He also posted the stories on his website.

In the seventies Rogers came out on the air. For the next three decades Rogers never swerved from his identity as an openly gay man, and most of his audience learned to be comfortable with his orientation at a time when most of the country was still openly hostile to homosexuality.

The fact that the people running WQAM pushed him into retirement speaks volumes about what radio in Miami and radio in America has become. When Rogers did not pick up his microphone on Tuesday, it was our loss, not his.