Arizona Sports 98.7 chose to delete a part of a segment of Tuesday morning’s Doug & Wolf show from its podcast. During the five minute conversation, the hosts discussed the concept of white privilege and how the phrase doesn’t register with them.
Both Doug Franz and Ron Wolfley acknowledged they grew up poor. They agreed that those experiences made it hard for them to understand how there is privilege that they have experienced just because of the color of their skin.
“That’s a great way to turn me off of the conversation because there was nobody in my life telling me white privilege when I lived below the federal poverty line myself,” Franz said. “There’s nobody that said white privilege when I talked my landlord into letting me pay my rent in installments because I couldn’t afford a whole $250 a month. So I would send $125 at the beginning of the month when I got a paycheck and I would wait for my next paycheck and I would pay the other $125.”
To his credit, Franz said that he was willing to listen to other points of view and comments from Suns coach Monty Williams about the way black people are treated in America were “an eye-opener.” Franz even followed through on his promise to consider other viewpoints by posting some of the articles and arguments sent to him on Twitter with a message of thanks.
“I grew up poor, ladies and gentlemen, so I guess the conversation has got to be it’s not like white people are the only people on the face of the planet that are racists,” Wolfley added. “Right? I mean, can we agree on this stuff? This is where the conversation will be productive if we can all agree on the truth. It’s the truth that will set us all free.”
Despite the two hosts clearly misunderstanding the concept of white privilege, the conversation doesn’t seem combative and even included Franz expressing a desire to hear opposing points of view.
The Athletic reached out to find out the justification for why the segment was deleted from the Doug & Wolfe podcast. Bonneville management said no one from the station would comment.
Arizona Sports 98.7 isn’t the first station this week to erase evidence of a host’s controversial comments on issues of race. The Fan in Indianapolis chose not to post a podcast of the Jeff & Big Joe show from Wednesday where host “Big” Joe Staysniak claimed that the black community needed to decide to “stop being a victim.”
