Regular readers of SeverinWatch will find familiar themes in Adam Reilly’s blog for the Boston Phoenix.
Jay Severin is still not dead
Tuned in today just to see how WTKK was playing the suspension thing. Anyone who’d missed the developments last week would think that Jay is just on vacation. They still have hosts “filling in for” him, and they’re still running commercials that Jay recorded. Today’s host was Doug VB Goudie from the local Fox affiliate. I heard him talking about a proposal to allow retail stores to be open on Thanksgiving. Whoa, talk about your hot button topics ….
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Best Jay Severin news ever
And this just days after he was heard crowing that the Boston Globe was losing its audience while Jay’s audience was steadily growing.
A number of folks are suggesting that Severin’s suspension may turn into a firing. Few are convinced that there was anything Severin said last week that was any more hateful or offensive than what he’s been saying for the last 10 years. Many speculate that Greater Media has just been waiting for a good excuse to shed his large salary.
The Boston Globe’s Scott Lehigh, a longtime Severin critic, has a good summary of the latest controversy and of Severin’s career in general.
When the axe finally falls on Severin’s head, I do hope that it’s made clear that his crime was not being politically incorrect but rather being not worth listening to.
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Jay Severin suspended for the wrong reason — maybe
I have been looking forward to the day when Jay Severin was taken off the air. But not like this.
We don’t know yet exactly why he was suspended – I have an alternative theory below – but it appears that it was related to his most recent (but certainly not new) comments about Mexicans.
Here’s some of the reporting about the suspension:
This development disappoints me because …
- If Jay Severin had been suspended every time he said something offensive about a group of people, he would have had many more days off the air than on in these past 10 years. Has anyone at Greater Media ever listened to his show?
- Jay and his sycophants can now rightly complain that he was taken off the air merely for expressing his opinion, and they’ll bring out the old “free speech” and “censorship” arguments. (These arguments are specious, because there is no right to express yourself on the radio, and a broadcaster is under no obligation to broadcast whatever its employees feel like saying. Nevertheless, Jay will get to play the martyr.)
- The real reasons that Jay should be off the air – that he presents lies as truth and idiocy as logic – will now get less attention.
It’s possible that there’s another story going on here. Earlier this week – Tuesday or Wednesday, I think – I heard Jay lead off the 6:00 hour (if memory serves) with a very curious monologue. Referring back to the St. Patrick’s Day incident, Jay told his listeners that he had “another Imus story.” He declined to tell the story and made some opaque comments about who knew the story and who didn’t, why he wasn’t at liberty to tell the story just yet, and why he was even mentioning it at this time. Jay was pretty ticked off about the whole thing, though – he even said “God damn it” on the air.
It would not surprise me at all to learn that Jay Severin has been suspended not for demonizing the citizens of Mexico but rather for picking a fight with his cellmate. After all, having Jay Severin say something bad about Don Imus could be bad for ratings.
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Jay Severin is wrong even when he’s right
Jay spent the 4:00 hour today talking about the possible demise of the Boston Globe. Jay actually managed to state a few things correctly, such as:
- The Globe is a business just like any other business. The fact that it is a newspaper doesn’t give it an excuse to keep operating indefinitely while losing money.
- The Globe has a lot less to offer these days in terms of original creative content than it used to.
- The Globe’s covers national and local events in a manner that is probably more satisfying to its more liberal readers than its more conservative ones.
But Jay’s analysis of root of the Globe’s problems was far off the mark. He repeatedly blamed the Globe for being out of touch with its readers politically and suggested that the Globe would be in better shape if its news coverage leaned less to the left. The impression I got from his soliloquies was that Jay thought this was the main reason for the Globe’s troubles; he later qualified it and said that political bias was among the top three reasons.
I suggested (on the air) that political bias was probably not in the top 10 reasons for declining circulation and advertising revenues. I pointed out that it’s not primarily alternative news sources that people are looking for, it’s alternative sources of classified advertising, sports scores, entertainment, and so on. I pointed out that of the five stories on the front page of today’s Globe, only one was even remotely political.
Think about it, Jay. Suppose you had your heart set on starting a newspaper in one of the most liberal areas of the country. How do you think you would sell the most papers? By printing something with a conservative slant? Or one with no discernable analysis at all but merely a recitation of fact? Nonsense. Look, the right-leaning Boston Herald was losing readers even faster than the Globe a year ago. If the Herald is more profitable than the Globe today (and I don’t know that it is), it’s because Herald management was better with money than Globe management. Bias in content has little to do with it.
I’m not sure how Jay responded to this, since he hung up on me and I wasn’t near a radio to hear it. But at least I was able to open the conversation with “The amazing thing about you, Jay, is that even when you’re right, you’re wrong.”
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Jay Severin doesn’t understand hypotheticals
Jay was discussing torture yesterday. He’s for it, of course. He trotted out one of his favorite hypothetical situations, which he attributes to Alan Dershowitz:
A child is locked up somewhere with only an hour’s worth of air remaining and you have in custody the guy who put the kid there. Do you torture the guy to make him reveal the kid’s whereabouts?
Jay thinks the answer in this case is obvious. Of course you do. You do whatever is necessary to save the kid’s life. (Jay doubted whether President Obama would be willing to inflict torture in order to save his own children’s lives, though.)
Now if the situation were really that simple, I imagine a large majority of Americans would agree. Saving a kid’s life gets a higher priority than honoring the rights of a depraved criminal. Jay insinuates that since torture in this situation is fair game, torture in just about any situation is fair game if it’s done with the intention of saving innocent lives and preventing innocent suffering.
But the situation is rarely that simple, and it’s certainly not that simple when it comes to the interrogation of suspected or even confessed terrorists. So I called Jay and asked how he would handle the situation under a few additional conditions:
A child is locked up somewhere with only an hour’s worth of air remaining and you have in custody the guy who put the kid there. You have the option of torturing the guy, but if you do, there’s only a 50% chance that he’ll give you the information you need to save the kid’s life. Also, if you torture him, his brothers will take revenge and kill four additional children. And the guy who you order to perform the torture will go insane, beat his wife, and leave his children.
My point, of course, was that an act of torture doesn’t affect only the results of the specific interrogation in question. Torture has the potential to breed all sorts of other problems which may turn out to be worse than the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.
Jay didn’t get it. His response was that my hypothetical was invalid because in real life child killers don’t have brothers who will take revenge on other children, and it’s not that hard to find people willing and able to torture prisoners without risk to their own mental health. (Jay, naturally, would be happy to spend his days torturing criminals and then go home to a sound sleep.) He quickly hung up on me before I was able to elaborate.
But Jay, the point of discussing hypothetical situations is not to debate how likely or unlikely the situations might be. The point is to make you think about the implications of your decisions. The idea that you’d have a kidnapper locked up while his victim is trapped with an hour’s worth of oxygen is by itself rather preposterous. Adding a few extra conditions as I did doesn’t invalidate the hypothetical. It merely complicates it – apparently to a point beyond Jay’s mental capacities.
By the way, it’s not at all clear that Dershowitz himelf would actually approve of torture in the kidnapped child scenario or even in what context the hypothetical was raised. If you Google {Dershowitz torture warrants} you’ll find a lot of material, most of which don’t even mention kidnapping. For an interesting response to the kidnapped child scenario, see this post from Amnesty International. I hadn’t seen this when I called Jay yesterday afternoon, but it makes some of the same points that I did.
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Severin vs. Imus: A death match I’d pay to see
How about “Two Men Enter: No Man Leaves?” Could we arrange that?
The Boston Herald has detailed coverage about the St. Patrick’s Day spat:
Imus threatens to shoot TKK’s Severin in Hub dust-up
Don Imus hits nerve with shoot ‘joke’
Don Imus deflects shoot threat
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Jay Severin wants us to bring it on
On March 13, Jay received a sycophantic call from a woman who lauded him for what she perceived as a heroic effort defending himself from callers who disagree with him. Jay said it was no big deal:
I come to the radio with two things: a vast amount of experience debating some of the smartest people in the world, and secondly –and its related — I know what I believe. You know, my statements, my analyses, my comments, my opinions all derive from a lifelong body of beliefs and values. [Rambling digression on a decades-old interaction with Mario Cuomo deleted.] If you’ve debated Mario Cuomo and professor Alan Dershowitz and everybody else you can think of on the left — those guys are all way smarter than I am. My point is, if if you’ve gotten through that and you know what you’re doing, you know what you believe — and that’s the key, the moral of the story here — if you know what you believe, you don’t ever have to worry about being called hypocritical or inconsistent or anything like that. If you have a set of beliefs and values, then your opinions and commentaries will flow from them. And I don’t want to discourage people from challenging me. I love it. I think it’s great radio and it’s great fun and it’s great exercise for the brain. But in terms of worrying that anyone will ever come on the radio and make me look silly or catch me in a lie or any of those things — believe me, I’ve been bullet tested for twenty years, so bring it on!
To which I respond:
- “If you know what you believe, you don’t ever have to worry about being called hypocritical or inconsistent” – But Jay, what if your beliefs themselves are hypocritical or inconsistent? For example, what if you believe that the government should play the smallest possible role in regulating relationships between consenting adults but you are also opposed to same-sex marriages (as you were until recently)?
- “I don’t want to discourage people from challenging me” – Really? Then why do you insult your on-air critics and hang up on them?
- “in terms of worrying that anyone will ever come on the radio and make me look silly or catch me in a lie or any of those things” – Be afraid, Jay. Be very afraid. I’m already doing it in my blog.
- “those guys are all way smarter than I am.” – At least we agree on one thing.
You want me to bring it on, Jay? I’m happy to be a guest on your show any time you want.
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Scott Lehigh on Jay Severin
Boston Globe columnist Scott Lehigh is one of Jay Severin’s best critics. Today, in his piece about the ludicrous charge leveled by Severin and others that Barack Obama is a socialist, Lehigh has a couple good lines:
WTKK’s Jay Severin … hilariously fancies himself a political polymath leading a rarefied radio discussion. (Severin imagines any number of things about himself that are at considerable variance with the truth.)
For more on the history between Lehigh and Severin, search Google.
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Will Jay Severin’s sponsors seal his fate?
Excellent news in today’s Boston Globe. It seems that some of his prime sponsors – the ones paying for his $1 million salary – may have reached the tipping point.
I have the same question for the sponsors that I do for Severin’s bosses: Have you ever listened to his show? Why is it that the recent comments about Mexicans are more offensive to you than anything he has said in the past about Muslims, Arabs, Afghans, Iraqis, Africans, Spanish speakers, the French, poor people, female Democrats, homosexuals, or any number of other groups or individuals?
I’d prefer to see Jay’s career end through a general recognition of his hypocrisy rather than his offensiveness, but if this is what it takes to get Jay Severin off the air, so be it.