Audio By Carbonatix
“They’re killing journalists in Denver.” The warning came in late on June 18, 1984; we were putting together the next issue of Westword, and the mother of our production manager called to warn us that KOA talk-show host Alan Berg had been gunned down in his driveway in Congress Park. She got the news on the radio; at the time, we didn’t have nonstop cable reports or cell phones, much less endless social media alerts. We were still pasting up the paper with knives and rubber cement.
And a lot of faith in the First Amendment.
Berg was not really a journalist, but a forerunner of the type of influencer epitomized by Charlie Kirk — although definitely from the flip side. A Jewish lawyer from Chicago, he’d moved to Denver for his health, became a suit salesman, then a store owner and an occasional radio talk-show guest. Ultimately, he became a star on KOA radio, whose huge signal sent Berg’s discussion of divisive issues like race and religion out across Colorado and the Great Plains, reaching thirty states. He was willing to talk to anyone, but he could be very tough with people who did not support his views. “You know, he just wanted to be the bad boy on radio,” said the late Stephen Singular, who wrote the book Talked to Death that came out a year after Berg’s murder.
By then, everyone knew he’d been assassinated by members of the white supremacist group The Order, which believed in killing all Jews and sending all black people to Africa.
Berg would defend to the death the rights of Jews and Black Americans…and just about everyone else, besides bullies and authoritarians.
And he did. “Berg knew exactly what he was doing,” recalls Peter Boyles, a fellow talk-show host who was a close friend of Berg’s. “The similarities are striking.”
The parallels to Kirk’s murder are indeed inescapable…although the fact that 42 years ago, a liberal pundit was killed for speaking freely has escaped most of the current overkill. Ronald Reagan was in the White House when Berg was killed; the government did not call for limits to free speech, much less demand that NBC pull Johnny Carson off late-night TV, even though Berg’s views were definitely not in line with those of the Great Communicator.
Instead, then-Governor Richard Lamm, a politician who did not shy from controversy himself and frequently appeared on Berg’s show, said it was a “societal tragedy” that people too often responded violently to opinions with which they disagreed.
Forty-one years later, they still do. But free speech should not pay the price.
