A SiriusXM spokesman Friday announced the firing of a co-host of the Opie & Anthony radio show, citing “racially charged” and incendiary tweets about a confrontation in New York City earlier in the week, the Associated Press reports.
Shock jock Anthony Cumia was fired late Thursday, SiriusXM spokesman Patrick Reilly told the AP. He described Cumia’s Twitter rant as “abhorrent” to SiriusXM, the news site reports.
Cumia’s response Friday on Twitter included an obscenity in relation to SiriusXM, the AP says. He argued that he was fired over material that was not aired and was not illegal, the report says.
Earlier in the week, Cumia posted tweets and photos about what he said was an attack on him as he took pictures in Times Square, the AP report says.
Cumia claimed that a woman, angered at being photographed, called him a “white mother (expletive)” and repeatedly punched him. He said he defended himself without hitting back, according to the report.
He then lashed out on Twitter with a torrent of profanity and insults against the black woman, including describing her as “pig face worthless” and using an anti-female expletive, the site says.
After other Twitter users reprimanded him for his incendiary comments, Cumia wrote that he was the victim and that he was being unfairly condemned for his views of violence in the black community, the report says.
Cumia is no stranger to controversy. In 2002, he and his co-host, Greg (Opie) Hughes, were suspended from WNEW-FM, a New York City radio station, after a series of stunts dubbed “Sex for Sam,” in which couples were asked to have sex in public places around the city, including at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Daily News reports. The station’s parent company, Infinity, paid a $357,000 fine to the Federal Communications Commission after the men were removed from the air, the report says.
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