Don't watch, don't listen

Whether it's the "Opie & Anthony" sex-in-church caper or a baseball-strike reporting blooper on national TV, when mistakes are made in broadcasting, nobody gets blamed.

By Keith Olbermann

Sept. 5, 2002 | Trust me on this: Nobody who gets fired in broadcasting gets the remainder of his salary.

Not me. Not those guys who suddenly disappear from your local TV newscast. Not the shock jocks "Opie & Anthony."

You've heard their story by now. These were the foofs on WNEW-FM in New York who encouraged a couple to get way too affectionate in the middle of St. Patrick's Cathedral. They spawned understandable outrage, muted cries about freedom of speech, and endless bad jokes about how they were usurping the privileges of priests.

But most of all, they tripped off a series of news reports about how they'd been "fired." Only down toward the end of these stories -- if even there -- was a brief mention about how their employers, Infinity Broadcasting, would try to reach a financial settlement regarding the remaining year of their contract, worth somewhere around $10 million.

Some firing, huh?

You can work backward on this. All television and radio contracts provide very clear, very explicit terms by which the employer has the right to terminate the deal, immediately, if the employees violate the agreement, or violate some code of behavior. Often these terms are so specific that they're nicknamed "Sacred Cow Clauses." I signed a contract once that prohibited me from making any derogatory reference to a former employer. If I did, I could be fired, on the spot, and not get another dime of my salary. Hasn't happened yet. I did get taken off the air last year, by Fox, but they had to pay me the last eight months of what I must tell you in all honesty was a ridiculously high salary. Unfortunately, I had to earn it by explaining what seemed to me like a pretty obvious distinction: Canceled? Yes. Fired? No -- here are the pay stubs to prove it.

I know I'm going slowly on this, but if A) "Opie & Anthony" had their show yanked out from under them for the St. Patrick's escapade, and B) their employers then acknowledged they were negotiating how much they still had to pay these two juvenile delinquents, what do we think point C) is?

They weren't fired, they were merely canceled. There was nothing in their contract that said they couldn't reward listeners for having sex in a cathedral while they broadcast a play-by-play description of it.

In other words, their employers knew exactly what they wanted from these guys. They got it, and only after it arrived with a bonus hailstorm of criticism, did they stop the show -- but not the paychecks. The show was canceled because Infinity Broadcasting needed to protect its corporate butt; if local religious leaders and broadcasting critics had all been on vacation that week, the two idiots would still be making pooh-pooh jokes on the air as we speak.

Of course the company knew something like the cathedral incident was a possibility. These two men were available to them only because they'd been offed by a Boston station for having falsely reported, on April Fool's Day in 1998, that the city's mayor, Thomas Menino, had been killed in an automobile accident.

In this deregulated world of broadcasting, there are enough atrocities committed in radio and television to fill not only a weekly column, but also to build an excellent case for requiring licenses -- or at least sanity tests and drug screens -- for broadcasting executives. Where is the reprimand against Infinity Broadcasting? Or its mogul, Mel Karmazin? What's his punishment? He hires "Opie & Anthony," pays them to play with explosives, and when they blow things up, all he has to do is pay off the rest of their contract?

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One cannot overestimate the convenience for broadcasters and executives of this process of letting responsibility fall between the cracks. The prima donnas of management whose lust for publicity makes us mere on-air folks look Amish don't get blamed. The on-air folks don't get fired. Some middle manager occasionally gets slapped around -- but rarely seriously, and rarely publicly.

Consider one of the national sports broadcasts of Friday Aug. 30. With the on-paper baseball strike deadline having passed hours earlier, with the practical drop-dead hour approaching, a correspondent went on his network and announced that he had learned that members of three teams had told union chief Don Fehr that they would not walk out. Triumphant in his scoop, he proceeded to push the envelope by getting live on-air reaction from the founding director of the union, Marvin Miller. Miller not only categorically denied the story, but upbraided the correspondent for refusing to name the three teams, and, more important, also pointed out that even if it had been true, it raised the question of how baseball was going to play out its schedule with only three teams.

It is not too much of a leap to infer that the "three teams won't strike" story was a bowdlerization of my own report in this space that, much earlier, three teams had voted against setting a deadline. The extrapolation might have been the correspondent's own; more likely it was provided to him by a wishful owner or team executive. Presented speculatively, it would've been a timely question: Might the extension of the negotiations well into the labor equivalent of extra innings have been a sign of player reluctance? Could the story be a leak from hard-line owners firing one last shot across the union bow in hopes of forcing an acceptance of whatever was on the table?

Next page: No retraction, no correction, no acknowledgment of doubt