Tag: talk radio

Howie being Howie

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr’s snide attack on state Sen. Jim Marzilli today is by the numbers, but it’s worth reading all the way to the last two lines. No, he hasn’t gotten over it. Will Carr get chewed out when he shows up at work this afternoon at WRKO Radio (AM 680), or will this just be waved off as Howie being Howie?

Meanwhile, good Jon Keller commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning on Marzilli’s lawyer, who’s gone way, way beyond the call of duty. While Marzilli himself has made it clear that he’s got some serious problems by checking in to a psychiatric hospital, his lawyer, Terrence Kennedy, has dismissed the charges against Marzilli as “ridiculous.”

That’s pretty offensive. What ever happened to “my client has pleaded not guilty, and beyond that we have no comment”?

Threatening “the voice of Black Boston”

Interesting story in the Dorchester Reporter on “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been targeted for elimination by the FCC. Managing editor Bill Forry writes:

Touch FM (officially LP-WTCH Boston) — which sprang from the bosom of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation offices in the fall of 2005 — is unlicensed. They admit it. They’re pirates.

And they are unrepentant, even in the face of the most recent broadside from the government: A May 7 forfeiture order from the FCC that levies a $17,000 fine on station founder Charles Clemons. The ruling stems from a pair of site visits made to the suspected TOUCH offices at the corner of Cheney Street and Blue Hill Avenue in 2007. The order accuses Clemons of “willfully and repeatedly” using the frequency without a license and for “failing to permit a station inspection.”

This is the Catch-22 of radio. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed local commercial radio and gave rise to corporate-owned, lowest-common-denominator pap.

Touch FM’s 100-watt signal — broadcast from an undisclosed location — puts it between WMJX (106.7 FM) and WROR (105.7 FM), two stations owned by Greater Media, which also employs the likes of right-wingers like Jay Severin and Michael Graham on another of its stations, WTKK (96.9 FM). Who’s doing more to serve the local community, TOUCH or Greater Media? Does the question even need to be asked?

Last June I covered a hearing by the FCC on localism in broadcast media. The agency claims to be very concerned about local content. Well, if officials would like to travel to Dorchester, they will find some.

Piercing talk radio

Charlie Pierce is on a talk-radio rampage. Last month he went after WTKK (96.9 FM), and specifically Don Imus, Michael Graham, Jay Severin, Laura Ingraham and Michele McPhee, whom he doesn’t actually name, referring to her only as “a woman who sounds like she’s shouting her program off the back porch of a three-decker in Revere.”

Now he’s back, targeting Tom Finneran of WRKO (AM 680) as host of “one of the lamest shows in the history of the electric radio device.”

I can’t say I disagree, except to note that McPhee doesn’t actually shout. It only seems that way.

Finneran embraces the dark side — again

You would have thought that WRKO Radio (AM 680) talk-show host Tom Finneran had learned from his last go-round. Less than three months ago, Finneran was lambasted for signing up to be a lobbyist for the state troopers union. He quickly backed off.

Now, though, Finneran, a former Massachusetts House speaker, has officially registered as a lobbyist, according to the Herald’s Jessica Heslam, and has taken on the Liquor Liability Joint Underwriting Association of Massachusetts as a client. If that sounds a little too obscure to worry about, just consider that Finneran’s new best friends will be very interested whenever there’s talk of new laws regarding underage drinking, drunken driving, liability insurance and the like. According to the organization’s Web site:

LLJUA is a liquor liability insurer of last-resort. To be eligible for coverage from LLJUA, the business owner has to be turned down for coverage in the voluntary market. LLJUA’s liquor liability insurance is available for owners of taverns, hotels, restaurants, social clubs, package stores, caterers and other businesses that sell alcoholic beverages.

So, let’s see. A man staggers out of a bar, wraps his car around a telephone pole and is seriously injured. His family sues the bar, claiming the bartender should have known he was drunk and refused to serve him. Finneran the talk-show host rails against the suit, claiming that the driver should take responsibility for his actions and that tort reform is needed to prevent such frivolous lawsuits. And Finneran the lobbyist pockets another check from the organization that stands to benefit from such “reform.” Got it.

My Northeastern colleague Steve Burgard is rightly appalled (I’m thinking of renaming this blog “Husky Nation”), telling the Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, “For a serious news organization, it would be unthinkable.” Hosting a talk show may not be journalism, but it’s an activity with many resemblances to journalism. Finneran doesn’t owe his tiny band of listeners much, but he does owe them his independence.

You’d like to think that when Finneran’s expressing his opinion in his tortured, rococo syntax that his opinion isn’t bought and paid for. But it is. He should be gone. And perhaps he will be — the Herald account suggests that WRKO management is none too happy about this.

More: The Outraged Liberal has further thoughts.

Photo (cc) by Brosner, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Finneran jumps the shark

Tom Finneran is on the air this morning, broadcasting from the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Which means that WRKO (AM 680) has already blown it. Program director Jason Wolfe should have hired a security guard to keep Finneran away from the microphone if that’s what it took to prevent the born-again lobbyist from using the public airwaves today.

I only listened for a few minutes so I could verify that (1) Finneran was doing his show and (2) he wasn’t talking about his lobbyist deal, reported today by Frank Phillips of the Globe. So I don’t know if the matter came up earlier in the broadcast. What I do know is that this is exactly what his critics predicted would happen when Finneran was hired, amid much ballyhoo and controversy, to take the 6-to-10 a.m. slot.

I like Finneran, even if I think his reign as Massachusetts House speaker was heavy-handed and occasionally abusive. I think his conviction on obstruction-of-justice charges was a travesty. I appreciate his efforts to establish a civil, substantive tone on his radio program, “Finneran’s Forum.” But though talk-show hosts don’t owe us much, they certainly owe us their independence. Now that’s gone.

According to Phillips’ story, Finneran the lobbyist is representing the state troopers union. How on earth can Finneran the talk-show host discuss public safety if he’s in the tank to a major player?

A word about ethics: No reputable news organization would allow a journalist to do this, whether he or she is a straight-news reporter or an opinion-monger. It’s not about objectivity, something that’s undesirable in columnists and talk-show hosts alike. Rather, the principle is that your opinions can’t be bought and paid for.

Yes, I understand that the ethical standards for talk-show hosts are different from those of journalists. (No self-respecting journalist, for instance, would read advertisements, which is part of the job description for talk-show hosts.) But there are areas where the ethics of these two very different media jobs coincide, and this is one of them. If Finneran were to criticize Gov. Deval Patrick’s public-safety policies, for instance, how can we know whether his opinion is sincere or if, instead, he’s grinding the union’s axe?

It’s possible — maybe even probable — that Finneran is looking beyond his talk-radio career. The show’s been dull, and one of the main reasons is that Mr. Speaker all too often sounds like he’s trying to maintain his political viability. His ratings have been painfully low. Perhaps he and management already have an understanding that when his contract runs out, he’s going to move on.

But this is an outrage. If Finneran plans to embark on a lobbying career, let him do it today. And let someone who’s not bought and paid for take his place at WRKO.

Dan Rea’s radio days

I’ve got a profile of Dan Rea in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine. Rea, a longtime television reporter at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), is now the host of the talk show once helmed by the late David Brudnoy and Paul Sullivan at WBZ Radio (AM 1030). “NightSide with Dan Rea” is an oasis of civility in the talk-radio wars. But can it work in today’s caustic environment?

Rea’s got some tough things to say about the state of local TV news, telling me, “It was very clear to me that there was a direction of television news that was not going to be reversed, and I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to continue doing television news as I was doing it.” He added:

Local television news is one of the great purveyors of racism of our time. They don’t understand that. But if you are somebody who lives out in one of the 128 or 495 suburbs, and never have a reason to really interact with people of color, the only time you’re going to see young black males is when they’re being arraigned, they’re being arrested, or they’re dying in the street. We ignore the 99 percent of the kids in that community who are trying to do the right thing, trying to go to school, trying to participate in community programs and athletics.

Rea is probably best known for his years-long efforts on behalf of Joseph Salvati, wrongly convicted of murder because of the false testimony of a government-protected witness.

Chris Lydon’s re-return

Christopher Lydon is back — again.

A couple of days ago I was checking my podcast subscriptions on iTunes when I saw that some new content had popped up in “Open Source,” his late, lamented public radio program. I made a mental note to investigate. Then, yesterday, Lydon and his producer, Mary McGrath, sent out an e-mail announcement that began, “The summer is over, and so is our hiatus,” and that explained the program has moved to Brown University.

It sounds as though Lydon has given up on radio: “Podcasting is the cheap, democratic, speedy, listener-friendly universal means of sharing and archiving original sound files of every kind.” But that’s fine with me. I’m not sure I ever listened to more than a few minutes of “Open Source” on the radio, but I frequently downloaded programs that sounded interesting. (They were.)

Looks like some good stuff is available. I’m going to start with Kanan Makiya — also the guest during a rip-roaring hour on Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” recently — and Oliver Sacks.

Photo of Lydon (cc) by Andy Carvin. Some rights reserved.

Why is McPhee sorry?

If the Boston Herald is going to report on Michele McPhee’s on-air apology for seeming to draw a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia, shouldn’t the paper also report what she was apologizing for?

On Thursday, the Boston Globe’s “Names” column included this item on McPhee:

WTKK apologized yesterday for a comment by Michele McPhee that seemed to equate homosexuality with pedophilia. McPhee, the brassy Boston Herald reporter who hosts a daily, two-hour talk show on 96.9 FM, was talking about the trend in the fashion industry toward skinny models. After saying that the industry is largely dominated by gay men, McPhee said: “And who do homosexual men like? Little boys.” Asked about the comment later, McPhee declined to talk to us. But a station official then issued the following statement: “Michele’s comments were made in the context of a fashion industry that designs women’s clothes for atypical body types. She regrets if her remarks were taken to mean anything else, as no other meaning was intended.”

Globe item prompted some further ruminations by John Gonzalez of Boston Magazine.

The Herald finally weighed in today. But though Herald reporter Jessica Heslam quotes McPhee’s apology at length, we never quite learn why she’s sorry.

Heslam does write, “Station officials have refused to release an audiotape of the comment in question.” But surely McPhee could have confirmed the quote reported by the Globe for her fellow Herald staffer. And failing that, the Herald could have have reproduced what McPhee had “reportedly” said. It’s not like she was denying it.

Same as it ever was

After all that, we’re going to have Howie Carr back in his old time slot on WRKO (AM 680) and a new/old Imus show in the morning on WTKK (96.9 FM)? Apparently so. WRKO is milking Carr’s return for all its worth, running a huge “I’M BAAACCK!” graphic on its Web site this morning.

Prediction: Howie’s numbers will be better than they were before he disappeared from the airwaves, at least for a while. He’ll have an opportunity to show some energy and attract some new listeners — or maybe bring back a few old ones who’d given up on him in recent years. But Imus, who hasn’t had the benefit of all the free publicity Carr received during the past few months, will have to rebuild.

Brian Maloney, who earlier this week was wondering if Carr might move to a talk station in Charlotte, N.C., now says, “Other than a higher salary, Howie doesn’t seem to have won a single battle.” Other than a higher salary? Good grief. We should all be such losers.

And why can’t someone come up with a new idea in this market that actually works?