The Super Bowl has never been as meaningful to me as the World Series was back in the 1950s, when I was a kid and baseball truly was the national pastime. Those were the days when all the games were played in the daytime and everybody found ways to skip work – and, in some […]

[Read more →]

It’s that time again! Haha so, funny story, we need to hire another creative and capable advertising executive to grow our media sales team.
Could that be you? Would you relish the opportunity to work with some very important and powerful bloggers and politico/media types?
We’re obviously a flourishing media operation with trillions of dedicated readers […]

[Read more →]

The closer we come to a Barack Obama victory on Nov. 4, the more the nation’s ultra-right-wingers are fretting that their monopoly on the radio industry might be in jeopardy. On ABC Sunday morning, Newt Gingrich darkly warned that the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the radio world might be in trouble if Obama […]

[Read more →]

In a stunningly short period, we have lost Edgar Allen, Elmer “Tiger” Hall, Luke Kruytbosch, Tony Snow, and Lee Wagner. All were friends except Snow, whom I had come to admire for his work – first on the Fox News Channel, then as President George Bush’s press secretary.
They were kindred spirits in that they were […]

[Read more →]

On the day CBS announced that Billy Packer’s 34-year run as lead network analyst at the NCAA Final Four was over, Packer appeared on his son Mark’s syndicated radio talk show. He seemed upbeat. He said it was a mutual agreement that had been worked out well before the 2008 Final Four in San Antonio. […]

[Read more →]

At a time when respect for journalists ranks somewhere between televangelists and politicians, the outpouring of respect and affection for Tim Russert was something of a phenomenon. The main reason so many people liked him was that he was the antithesis of the hatemongers and charlatans – yes, this means you, Limbaugh and Michael Savage […]

[Read more →]

If you read David Hawpe’s column in today’s Courier-Journal, you may have been surprised to learn that he received an inscribed football from the members of the 1961-’62 freshman football team at the University of Kentucky. Why the surprise? Well, suffice it to say that in his long and distinguished editorial career, David has exhibited […]

[Read more →]

When I was sports editor of The Courier-Journal, I tried to cover the U.S. Open golf tournament every year. I did it mainly because I believe Louisville and southern Indiana is a golf hotbed. Of course, it helped that I loved to play the game, one of Dan Jenkins “dogged victims of inexorable fate.”
So I […]

[Read more →]

Whenever Jim McKay walked through a pressbox, he wanted to be treated as just one of the guys. His ego was the flip side of Howard Cosell, his longtime colleague on ABC Sports. Where Cosell was bombastic and vain, McKay was quiet, dignified, and totally unimpressed with himself.
Among the ink-stained wretches – or dashing knights […]

[Read more →]

ESPN proved to be such a smash hit with the nation’s sports junkies that Ted Turner decided to create a similar cable network for political and pop-culture junkies. He called it CNN, which begat the Fox News Channel, which begat MSNBC and all sorts of other around-the-clock cable channels.
The net effect has been to virtually […]

[Read more →]