Scoop Nisker "Last News Show: Operation Seaspray"

"Scoop" Nisker (1942-2023) is fondly remembered for his innovative audio collages and news commentaries on the “Jive 95” KSAN in the late 1960s into the 1970s. He reprised the act in the 1980s and 1990s on KFOG.  Nisker was inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame in 2016.

Nisker was well known for his catchphrase, “If you don’t like the news … go out and make some of your own,” which he also used as the title for a popular 1994 book, one of  several he wrote about the news and his career.

A Nebraska native, Nisker moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s after studying at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University in New York. “I went to San Francisco in order to be a beatnik but I was too late, so I was assigned to the hippies,” he often said.

This segment appreared on Nisker's regular KSAN feature The Last News Show and is an example of his innovative and provocative approach to news coverage. In this case, the story was the revelation during 1977 U.S. Senate hearings that San Francisco had been dosed with Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria in a 1950 U.S. Navy experiment known as "Operation Seaspray".