A month after Nieman Watchdog posted my piece urging news organizations’ owners and managers to hold their talk-show hosts accountable, one of the most popular—and most awful—of those hosts demonstrated anew the need to bring accountability to these motor-mouths.

Autism is “[a] fraud, a racket,” Michael Savage asserted on “The Savage Nation” on July 16. “In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ”

Understandably, Savage set off a storm, which Jacques Steinberg reported in the New York Times on July 22:

In New York City, Autism United, a coalition of organizations that advocate on behalf of children with autism and provide services to them, staged a protest Monday outside the studios of WOR (710 AM), which carries Mr. Savage’s program weeknights from 6 to 9 p.m., Eastern time.

“He characterizes children with autism who are very, very ill – disabled children – as essentially bad kids; the only thing wrong with them is they have parents who don’t discipline them,” said John Gilmore, executive director of Autism United and the father of an 8-year-old with a diagnosis of autism. “That completely misrepresents what is going on with children with autism.”

Talk Radio Network syndicates “The Savage Nation” to more than 350 radio stations. Its chief executive, Mark Masters, “did not respond to several messages left at his office Monday morning,” Steinberg wrote.

Savage would have a father tell an autistic son who is still a child to “act like a man.” Would that he would tell Masters to do the same.