from savewrko.com, some comments:
RE: Todd Feinberg, Not only is he just a placeholder, he’s maladroit as a radio host and has no place in afternoon drive in the Boston market. He’s boring, annoying and condescending. In addition, his voice is more suited to making supermarket PA announcements. It is clear from this situation that Ms. Kahn and her team have no clue as to how to run a radio station, if I were an Entercom stockholder I would be furious.
Posted by: Rob at September 26, 2007 06:38 PM
I live in Minnesota and listen to Carr’s show via a podcast. I had to visit Boston this week and turned on WRKO during the evening drive time. They had some guy hosting the show and he spent an hour talking about expensive homes in Massachusetts. Duh! Boring!
Posted by: jbenson2 at September 26, 2007 06:50 PM
Thu. re-ping; interesting bit from SaveWRKO.com....
Brian Maloney writes:
Frankly, keeping up with the interconnected nature of Boston’s thoroughly corrupt and elitist politics and media power structure is a full- time job.
Having lived in a number of places, I’ve never seen anything like it. The rot here truly knows no boundaries.
Here’s a prime example of that incestuous environment: a magazine overseen by Empress Kahn’s husband, Dan Scully, has used its latest issue to savage Howie Carr.
That’s right, Empress Kahn’s husband rules the roost over at Boston magazine, also known as Suck-Up Central.
In a puff piece interview with Billy Bulger, brother of fugitive murderer / mobster Whitey, it’s Carr’s credibility that is taken to task, not that of Boston’s most notorious crime family. This is truly sick:
HERE IS THE EXCERPT—EXPLETIVES DELETED:
GIVEN THE RANCOR HE’S INSPIRED OVER THE YEARS, you might expect some of the people who run into Bulger to give him hell. Bostonians, after all, are no strangers to the practice of hurling abuse out of car windows at each other.
But Bulger insists most people he encounters on the street are respectful to him, and that hostile run-ins are “very rare.” He offers an example. “I’m going to Mass General Hospital the other day,” he says. “The guy doesn’t know I’m with my wife. These are his exact words: ‘How ya doin’, good luck, and f-— Howie Carr.’”
Howie Carr: for years Bulger’s bane, his tormentor, his new terrorist. The name comes up often with Bulger, and when it does, he doesn’t speak it so much as cough it up; occasionally, he swaps in “the savage,” or, better, “that excrescence.”
The dynamic between Bulger and the popular Herald columnist and talk show host is what Moby Dick would be like if the whale were as obsessed with Ahab as Ahab is with the whale. (“I see in him outrageous strength,” Ahab says of his nemesis, “with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”)
In addition to writing The Brothers Bulger, an absolutely scathing though largely uncorroborated account of the reigns of Billy and Whitey that contends the two worked in concert to build and fortify their respective empires, Carr never wastes a chance to flog the man he relishes calling the “Corrupt Midget,” even if it means dropping anti-Bulger non sequiturs as a kind of shorthand for corruption or nepotism. (In a June column, for example, he trashed someone for being “the first cousin of Billy Bulger’s predecessor as Senate president.”)
The climax of the feud came in 2003, during Bulger’s disastrous testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, which was investigating his ties to his brother, along with other allegations of miscellaneous skullduggery. Carr positioned himself directly behind Bulger, so that his head appeared right over Bulger’s shoulder on TV, and spent the entire testimony rolling his eyes and making choking faces for the cameras. Watching that performance, you got the sense that Carr’s already got half of his savage Billy Bulger obituary written, and is just waiting for the “CM” to kick off so he can do what Hunter S. Thompson did to Nixon, and H. L. Mencken did to William Jennings Bryan—namely, kill his ghost before it gets too far from his body. Carr even included a joke along those lines in the index of his book. Under “Bulger, William Michael ‘Billy’ Sr.,” there’s an entry, “demise of,” that points to passages on Bulger bombing at the 1991 St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast and his 2003 appearance before the House committee.
What really makes the fracas interesting is how similar the two men are. Both come from humble beginnings, attained a top-shelf education, and rose to the local apex of their respective fields. Both are immensely intelligent, though given to cheap showmanship—Bulger with his rote Irishness and Carr with his tired fat jokes and gay-baiting. Both have long, long memories and possess unmatched knowledge of the inner workings of Beacon Hill. Both wrote books about Billy Bulger that were praised nationally and panned locally, and both can be very kind and charitable to people, but are reputed to be painfully sensitive to criticism and prone to pettiness and vindictiveness. They could be brothers themselves.
At one point, I ask Bulger if he’s read Carr’s book. “I couldn’t bring myself to look at it,” he says. “I can’t even listen to him. He’s just so evil. All kinds of things—he just makes it up.”
BRIAN MALONEY AGAIN:
“Let’s go back to my post from earlier today: do you really think my theory that Entercom is quite happy to see Carr silenced is off base?
What kind of publication writes a puff piece on the likes of Billy Bulger, using it to trash his key critic? Only in Boston. This isn’t normal and this most certainly isn’t America.”