Stations Boycott Dixie Chicks Over Remark
DALLAS – Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, is finding out that sometimes saying you’re sorry doesn’t make much of a difference.
Radio stations nationwide are boycotting the Dixie Chicks, even though Maines publicly apologized for telling a London audience last Monday: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
Maines is a Lubbock native.
In her apology Friday, Maines said: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect.”
The words didn’t carry much weight with listeners in Maines’ home state and elsewhere.
“We’ve had a huge listener reaction and movement against the statements,” said Paul Williams of KPLX-FM in Dallas-Fort Worth, the nation’s fifth largest radio market.
In Kansas City, Mo., WDAF-AM set trash cans outside its offices for listeners to toss their Dixie Chicks CDs. Its Web site displayed more than 800 listener e-mails, most of them in support of the station’s boycott.
After more than 250 listeners called Friday to complain about Maines’ comments, WTDR-FM in Talladega, Ala., dropped the Dixie Chicks.
“The emotion of the callers telling us about their fathers and sons and brothers who are overseas now and who fought in previous wars was very specific,” said Jim Jacobs, president of Jacobs Broadcast Group, which includes WTDR.
The Dixie Chicks are in Europe promoting their recent release “Home,” which won a Grammy last month for Best Country Album. The group is scheduled to kick off the U.S. leg of its “Top of the World Tour” on May 1 in Greenville, S.C.
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