Entercom has fired Chad Dukes. The DC sports radio host made comments on his personal podcast that the company deemed “racist” and “inappropriate.” Scott Allen of The Washington Post’s “DC Sports Blog” was the first to report the news.
Allen did not have specifics on what the offending comments were. He says that DC Market Manager Ivy Savoy-Smith wrote in an email “Our air talent are ambassadors of our brand, and we do not want to be affiliated with these comments.”
The station addressed the firing on air on Friday morning. JP Flaim made a statement on air during the first hour of The Sports Junkies.
“Chad Dukes is no longer with 106.7 The Fan,” he said. “Our company recently learned of inappropriate comments that he made in past episodes of his personal podcast and our company has zero tolerance for any forms of hateful speech, so our focus, the Junkies, remains on sports and doing the best show we can. With that said, I don’t think we’re saying anything further on it.”
A lot remains unknown at the moment, including who will replace Dukes. It is the first opening 106.7 the Fan has had since January of 2014. That is when Grant Paulsen and Danny Rouhier began hosting in mid days.
Dukes has gone dark. The last episode of his Rodkast podcast is from September. All of his tweets have been deleted. His audio and image have also been scrubbed from the Fan’s website.
here it is, racist??? Uh no, call the station to complain!
There are real, legitimate concerns that people have that have nothing to do with the fact that they’re against people with bad skin tone. There’s personal accountability issues, there’s family structure issues, there’s the fact that communities with more violence and crime need to be policed more so they have higher interactions with police officers—none of that can be spoken about. It’s “this person killed this person and now we burn down the city.” And there’s a lot of people that are smart enough to realize that there’s a more nuanced conversation, but they’re not allowed to talk about it. So what you’re talking about is, you’re like, “this is great, we’re having a conversation.” No we’re not. We’re continuing to allow one group to speak and silencing the other one and castigating them.