By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Jay Severin, unreliable source

Here’s the kind of false propaganda Jay Severin pumps into the heads of his listeners, whom he likes to call “the best and the brightest.” Within the past 15 minutes, he went into a riff about how the mainstream media, out of “professional courtesy,” would not cover the fact that CNN had allowed Democratic ringers to take part in the YouTube debate. He specifically mentioned the New York Times as refusing to cover the story.

In fact, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran prominent stories today, both of which were featured on Jim Romenesko’s heavily trafficked media-news site, along with Media Nation. Now, the Times and the Post are only the two most important newspapers in the country. But just for good measure, check out the results of this Google News search.

Severin either lied about today’s Times (and the rest of the media), or bloviated about what he imagined the Times had done without bothering to check. I’m not sure which is worse.


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9 Comments

  1. zadig

    Or the worst possibility yet: listening to Severin at all. He’s the guy who thinks the height of political commentary is to call Hillary Clinton fat. Why should anyone listen to him at all?

  2. BosPhotog

    This type of mistake has been present whenever I have listened to his show. Last month he spoke of how fond he is of Kurt Vonnegut. He went on and on about the author in a way that clearly showed that Severin was not aware that he died six months earlier.

  3. Anonymous

    zadig said… Or the worst possibility yet: listening to Severin at all. He’s the guy who thinks the height of political commentary is to call Hillary Clinton fat. Why should anyone listen to him at all?But Hillary Clinton is fat???

  4. mike_b1

    Don’t know how you can single out the Times and the Post as the “two most important papers in the country.” The Wall Street Journal would take issue with that … as would I.

  5. Anonymous

    dan listens to severin so the rest of us don’t have to!

  6. zadig

    On the assumption that “anonymous” #1 above isn’t just Jay Severin trolling stories about himself, I’ll point out the following:1) Only under the most twisted, super-model fueled, anorectic view of the female body can Hillary Clinton be viewed as “fat”2) Even if she were fat, two-headed, or sprouting two horns from her forehead, that still doesn’t make pointing these things out valid political commentary. In fact, statements about her appearance, or her laugh, or her voice are the kind of things a person points out when he has no policy or political action ammo to fire.(Severin seems obsessed with all of these aspects of Hillary Clinton, leading me to wonder if he didn’t hit on her once and get shot down or something. Most likely he was mocked by someone in high school who vaguely reminds him of Hillary, and he’s been getting his revenge ever since she appeared on the political scene.)He’s a joke, and I hope Hillary gets the presidency just so I can enjoy it when Severin’s head explodes.

  7. Dan Kennedy

    Zadig: I dunno … personally, I’d find horns problematic.

  8. Dan Kennedy

    Mike: Good point about the Wall Street Journal. I’m getting ahead of the story. A year from now we won’t be calling it one of our most important papers.

  9. mike_b1

    Watching Murdoch over the next year will be surreal. While I would concur that the Journal will slip, it’s hard to imagine all its talent would flee at once (for starters, where would they all go?). And the idea that the world will be able to access its stories gratis could actuallyincrease its influence, at least over the short term.Even with some slippage, it would remain the paper of record for the business community, with no others seeming ready to step into the (predicted) void.

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