Facebook Twitter Share Email Print RSS Comment

Art Modell made an incredible first impression upon me. The first time I was formally introduced to him was in mid-1996 at the Signet Tower downtown in the original Ravens offices and we had a “getting to know you” conversation in his office when he was still reeling from the Cleveland media fallout from the move of the Browns to Baltimore.

Six months after he was portrayed in a cartoon on the cover of Sports Illustrated as “kicking the dawgs,” Modell — a complete stranger to me — made an incredibly telling pronouncement to me about the kind of guy he was and his philosophy on the media and credibility.

Being an old TV guy, he looked at me with incredible conviction in the first 20 minutes that I knew him and said: “You NEVER be afraid to criticize me! Say what you feel and think and try to be fair and honest. If all you ever do is praise me they’ll know you’re a phony and they’ll never believe a word you say. You HAVE to criticize and question me to be credible.”

Wow…

Imagine that coming from Peter G. Angelos?

Just think about that statement – and the wisdom of it – for a moment.

And then tell me how you can POSSIBLY dispute the premise?

I loved Chuck Thompson. I loved Rex Barney as a person. I like “nice” guys. Hell, I threw a banquet for the nicest guys in Baltimore sports every year for nearly a decade raising more than $200,000 for local charities until the Orioles decided to stop participating. (And if THAT isn’t rich with irony, I don’t know what is? The Orioles decided that a “Nice Guy Award” was something they didn’t want to be associated with…)

But it’s my opinion that guys in the media who are “too nice” all the time are not only a poor source for real information, but in many ways they’re same people that I never read, listen to or respect because they don’t have an opinion or a credible view on a topic. I’m assuming they all HAVE opinions but they’re too afraid to share them for fear of the kinds or reprisals and criticism that I get every day here in the comments at WNST.net.

But as I always say, if you want to piss someone off, just offer your opinion. It’s the way of the world.

But at some point, a member of the media has to have a little bit of a spine for me to pay any attention to him or her or to give them my valuable time in hearing their message. (On the flip side, if you’re only schtick is trashing people 24×7, I’m not at all interested in that, either.)

I found it fascinating that Jon Miller finally made it into the Hall of Fame earlier this week. Thirteen years ago, Miller attempted to bring Peter Angelos into the world of the 21^st century where to have credibility with a mass audience you need to have freedom of speech and the ability to opine with conviction. Especially when you’re doing nine innings a night, more than 150 nights a year.

For this – Jon Miller, the greatest baseball broadcaster of our generation — was fired. In hindsight, I have to believe it was the greatest thing that ever happened to Miller, not having to be a eunuch for the last 13 years as the franchise has disintegrated into a last place, civic disgrace.

But the Angelos Orioles didn’t care then and I’m sure they don’t care now. They went and got Jim Hunter – a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees – who’s been “bleeding a little orange and black” for the last 13 years while polishing up 13 consecutive years of meaningless baseball games.

Here’s a clip from that fateful interview I did with Peter Angelos in 1997 when he opined about Jon Miller, Baltimore on the road jerseys, baseball in Washington and a variety of other issues. Other than the “I’m a very available individual” comment, my favorite and most telling part of the interview came when we discussed the role of broadcasters and broadcast partners and their role as “not being journalists.”

It’s only a minute long. I edited down so you can listen for yourself:

So if you think I was a little “hard” or “honest” or “ballsy” in the words that I wrote in Monday’s blog about the current state of Baltimore sports media, this clip is for you. As always, I wrote the truth. This is how Peter Angelos thinks. This is his reality, in his own words and spoken with the passion and conviction of a man on a mission to quell any free thoughts, like his pal Fidel Castro.

I did Free The Birds “protest” back on Sept. 21, 2006, walking out of the stadium with 2,000 people so now I’m banned. Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked after listening to it again.

Apparently, free speech is something that’s against the rules in his kingdom.

And this, of course, brings us to the kind of “relationship” Angelos has enjoyed with his broadcast partners over the years.

The integrity of the upper management of CBS Radio – namely Bob Phillips and Dave Labrozzi — must be questioned at this point if you heard what Angelos’ mandates are in the above recording. Of course, if you’ve ever listened to WJZ-FM 105.7 “The Fan” you know that I speak the truth about their inability to give you the truth.

Phillips and Labrozzi, via their exclusive arrangement with Angelos and their cozy TV simulcast on MASN, which is wholly owned by Angelos and financially supported via his unwitting cable subscribers, have given up all rights to free speech regarding their sports talk mouthpiece “The Fan.”

Since Phillips royally offended virtually everyone in the Ravens organization over the years when CBS Radio held the purple flagship rights, he was kind of stuck and had to take the Orioles once he was dumped in Owings Mills.

After that loss of the most significant sports property in the marketplace, “The Fan” has made two advertising claims that I find to be among the most phony and disingenuous pronouncements I’ve ever heard.

Let’s start with “Gameday Uncensored,” which was an obvious threat to “get tough” on the Ravens, like a jilted lover. In other words, “you broke up with us and now I’m going to shove it up your rectum if you lose.”

Since that and a very ugly squabble over the legality of their parking lot tailgate, Phillips has once again rankled not only the Ravens but their new broadcast partner, WBAL, by not following a gentleman’s agreement.

Against the wishes of John Harbaugh and the Ravens’ ownership, Phillips has thrown several hundred thousand dollars toward various players for midweek radio shows that I was bluntly told would not be allowed, although the team has no ability via the NFLPA to enforce keeping their players off of the radio at “The Fan.” I honestly think most of Baltimore believes it was Anita Marks’ sole role at the station to be a personal valet for Willis McGahee and Chris McAlister. She was sorta the “Miss Elizabeth” of Baltimore radio.

And if that’s not sadly comical, check out this graphic of a recent ad I saw:

No B.S.? Really? Has anyone in Baltimore heard their radio coverage of the baseball team that lost 98 games last summer and hasn’t played a meaningful game since my son was in the 7^th grade? (He’s now 25, by the way…)

Mark Viviano, Damon Yaffe, Bruce Cunningham and Scott Garceau – and anyone else I’ve missed or anyone else who they’ll hire – don’t have the ability or “right” to speak the truth about anything Orioles related. But we all sort of know that, right? (See video above…)

The “rights” to the team’s play-by-play means that you DON’T have the right to tell the truth about the agony of the fans, the losing tradition, the despair of the downtown business community or the team’s refusal to spend any of the $110 million they’re making this year via the MASN deal.

It’s almost comical. They don’t report on the suppression of free speech while they refuse to ask any questions or force any accountability from a billionaire baseball team ownership group that has turned downtown Baltimore into a spring and summer ghost town on summer nights while raping the city of three generations of civic pride and heritage for baseball and pocketing tens of millions of dollars of our cable TV money.

And of course, banning free speech and never taking a question from anyone in the public is standard operating procedure for the baseball team.

So let’s do the dirty, little, “hush money” tree from the top down, shall we? (Pay attention, we might have a quiz at the end of this…or you might just simply have a headache.)

Peter Angelos is a tyrant, a megalomaniac and an opponent of free speech – at this point that supposition should be inarguable by any sensible person.

He owns the Orioles and MASN, where he prints money off the public’s back via their cable TV bill. Angelos has “partnered” with CBS Radio, who pays HIM money and then is a eunuch in every facet of their sports talk product in regard to the worst franchise in the sport. CBS also happens to own WJZ-TV Channel 13, where the Orioles not only put games on during some summer nights, but also use them to co-market “The Fan” and MASN, via a daily simulcast partnership.

Jay Newman, who runs CBS’ WJZ-TV also has a “content sharing” partnership with the bankrupt, dying newspaper down on Calvert Street called The Baltimore Sun. And last, but not least, there’s Pressbox, the woefully out-of-touch monthly sports publication that takes Angelos’ money for print ads (and you KNOW what that means) and is weekend broadcast partners with Bob Phillips and CBS Radio, not to mention WMAR-TV Channel 2.

It’s like one giant old white guy’s media orgy under the cones of silence where Angelos is the fat guy in the middle getting fed grapes by all of his indentured servants and throwing the peasants and the executives money to “tell it the way it really is, but keep your opinions to yourself.”

Read that quote again and go back and listen to it in Angelos’ voice one more time. That’s the EXACT quote…

I guess civic accountability isn’t as significant as that orange ad for fireworks night or The Sun logo over the clock in centerfield at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Who knows? Angelos would be happy if he didn’t lease the boys on Calvert Street a skybox. Word is the fellas in purple across the street are still chasing their pre-bankruptcy skybox money from an advertising deal with the Tribune boys.

So who is the real loser in this continued suppression of ideology and free speech when the teams that are publicly financed, supported and beloved are threatening the media’s ability to have “free speech” via partnership deals?

That would be the citizens of Baltimore.

What do you really want me to do? Endorse 13 years of mean-spirited behavior and ineptitude all while the team continues to lose and print money at a mind-blowing level? Money that’s being siphoned quietly off of your cable TV bill?

Is that what a real “fan” of the team or the community should do? Is that a responsible act on my part to “play the game?” Should I “tell it like it is but keep my opinions to myself?”

There’s NO chance that’s going to happen with me or with WNST.net while I have a breath left in my body.

But you know who WILL endorse it?

Yep…you guessed it! Just about EVERYBODY else!

WBAL did for years, until it got nasty between Jeff Beauchamp, Ed Kiernan & the Angelos boys. When we did Free The Birds, you could hear the chant “Free The Birds” for about 75 minutes all during the radio broadcast of the game. When I left the stadium there were news crews downtown covering the protest. But the Orioles broadcasters NEVER made mention of the event but immediately following the game threw back to the WBAL-AM studios calling themselves “Maryland’s news leader.”

Journalism? Not really…

And now Bob Phillips – the “real” king of Baltimore sports media stars – is happy to keep his country club membership while hiring “experts” like Anita Marks to bring you what’s “really” happening in Baltimore sports. Or worse yet, Phillips has taken formerly respected media personalities and told them to “tell it like it is, but keep your opinions to yourself.”

Phillips and CBS Radio are so busy alternately create love & hate for the Ravens that I honestly can’t figure it out — love for the players and their fame and money and hate for the purple management and ownership. Gameday Uncensored. Anita Marks as an “expert.” Mark Viviano doing a love in from the field in Westminster and post-game video via MASN from the bowels of M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens unwittingly went into business with Angelos only to have pre-game shows not exist in part of the first season of the arrangement.

Meanwhile, poor Scott Garceau seems to be pining away to do play-by-play again, waiting for the folks at WBAL and Hearst on TV Hill to go out of business and allow Bob Phillips to get his hands back onto the exorbitant rights fees of the Ravens that have driven both WBAL & 98 Rock into being nearly broke and Steve Davis and the aforementioned Beauchamp to be on the unemployment line.

We now live in an era where cheaters and liars and thieves can run rampant, even in our local government. And when they do, people like Phillips are there to offer them a job doing radio to “set the record straight.” I wonder what day part Sheila Dixon will host come 2011 at CBS Radio?

In sports, there’s national outrage over steroid scandals and crooked referees and Tiger Woods’ sex life.

But in Baltimore, where the steroid scandal played a massive role, there was no investigation into any of the Orioles’ links by the local media. Most people in baseball would tell you the Orioles were the epicenter of the steroid scandal. From Rafael Palmeiro to Jason Grimsley to David Segui to Sammy Sosa to Brian Roberts to Larry Bigbie to Jay Gibbons, the Camden Yards clubhouse was the epitome of the problem in the sport five years ago yet no one here even took on the issue because of Angelos’ mandates and the banning of people like me have what’s left of the “media” in town frightened to speak their minds for fear of losing their career.

And as I stated on Tuesday, I get it. These people have families to feed, children in school, bills to pay like the rest of us.

And as you can well imagine, Angelos’ people routinely pick up the phone and tell people not to do business with WNST. They did it on Monday after Part One of this series.

But where would the sports world be without investigative reporting? Where will this country be when the people who are counted on to catch the cheaters are threatened to “tell it like it is, but keep your opinions to yourself.”

Who would catch crooked NBA referees, and billionaire golfers who claim to be squeaky clean and a role model and then cheat on their wives at every turn? Who would be the ones to investigate BALCO and the likes of Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa?

But we also live in a world where people can write anonymous graffiti on the internet or unaccountable, un-credentialed and uninformed bloggers can accuse anyone of using steroids or far worse. We have fans shooting pictures of inebriated athletes, philandering celebrities and coaches with middle fingers.

We even have crooked reporters at the New York Times who are stealing stories and making up fictional essays and presenting them as facts.

But there’s nothing worse, in my mind, than a media organization passing itself off as a credible source of “news” or “friends you can turn to” or “community watchdogs” and then taking a paycheck as hush money by the sports teams and somehow making a “flagship” status sound like that access is somehow valuable when it mutes the most powerful credibility-builder of them all: telling the truth and giving a balanced assessment of a topic or issue.

In the sports media world it’s almost criminal what’s happening here, especially when you consider the immense cash flow of the baseball team and its community-gifted gold mine called MASN.

“Mister Angelos and Sons Network”…

“Making Absurd Sums for Nothing”…

Whatever you refer to it as, just know this:

They are PRINTING money and are into everyone in the state’s pocketbook for civic, media welfare via your cable bill. And all because Bug Selig couldn’t figure out how to make baseball work in Montreal, and Washington, D.C. was the only other place that wanted the Expos (outside of Puerto Rico, where they hosted game for several years before quitting).

Angelos killed baseball enthusiasm in Baltimore. Washington fans left and eventually got the team. Selig and MLB legal team got nervous when Angelos threatened litigation over territorial rights, Comcast got bent over in court by crooked judges and the rest is history. Angelos controls all of the money, both teams’ survival really, because he makes money no matter what. Even when the team loses 98 games, he gets his $110 million annually. And the MLB owners gave him an astonishing “floor” price of $335 million – twice what he paid for the franchise.

Modern day radio play-by-play in Baltimore is all but worthless. No one listens to the games. (Hell, no one goes to the games!) There are no direct sales outlets for the games. And the internet access and checking scores on mobile devices has all but eliminated anyone’s need to “run out to the car” to check the score, like we used to do in the 1970s.

Now, the Orioles rest at CBS Radio via 105.7 “The Fan.” They have hosts whose bread was buttered several years ago from criticizing the Orioles and Angelos the way I do – that is, until the rights fell into the hands of Bob Phillips, who is more interested in squeezing money out of the Orioles than in doing the right thing for the city, which has been broken on summer nights due to the ineptitude and mean-spiritedness of the people who run the team.

Sure, the Orioles lost 98 games. The fans of the team lost 98 games. The players lost 98 games.

But Angelos MADE $40 million in 2009 on the Orioles and our tax dollars.

So, who is going to report that besides us?

Oh, that’s right. Or write? The Baltimore Sun – the “newspaper of record,” who has signage in the stadium, orange ads in their slimmed down sports section and a skybox at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

I’m sure THEY’RE gonna tell Baltimore the truth while they’re in bankruptcy and gutting their editorial staff?

And I love how all of these “traditional” media pretend we don’t exist. See yesterday’s piece and Part 3 for more on that.

We’re the “guys down the dial” or “that little AM radio station” which cracks me up, because we’re NOT a radio station. If you’re reading these very words you KNOW we have power beyond the AM radio station the federal government affords me with antiquated 1948 rules. You’re reading my words here – not hearing them in the car on your radio — because the internet is powerful.

No one EVER mentions my name or they would dare break the news that we actually exist and the fact that we’re telling the truth. But as I’ve said many times before, I’ll ENCOURAGE you to visit them. We’re better than them. And we’ll prove it every hour of every day by competing, breaking news, giving you honest and accurate information loaded with expertise and authenticity and integrity.

But they think this is the right way to do business. Maybe it is if you’re Bob Phillips and you’re just trying to make your quarterly numbers for the stockholders. But probably not, in my mind, if you care to create a brand that people trust and will turn to for the next 25 years.

Recently a sports official told me – as if it was GOSPEL – that the Baltimore Sun is on 230,000 doorsteps every morning in our state. THAT, I find about as hard to believe as the 18,000 who regularly come to Camden Yards disguised as about 10,000 to anyone’s eyes who have ever estimated crowds in stadiums. It’s beyond laughable.

But the bigger the fake numbers, the more money they can all make.

So if you think that these media “monoliths” – the same ones who have no integrity in reporting on broadcast partners (and as we showed you above, they’re all kinda interconnected and sleeping together in one way or another) — are not above adjusting the odometer for their financial benefit then I have some non-floodable property for you in New Orleans.

Yet here comes the great equalizer: the world wide web.

And we’re trying to make it – and the information we give you as independent, caring local journalists — better.

You can let us know how we can be better – and judge the local sports media for yourself – by filling out our extensive “State of Baltimore Sports Media” survey here…

We’re building this company for the Baltimore sports fans.

Who do you trust in 2010?

Where do you get your information and who is “greasing” whom?

As Paul Harvey once said, “Now you know the rest of the story…”

Our FINAL class has been postponed until Tuesday: The future? Where is this all heading in a world of ever-evolving personal communication and connection.