Substance need not equal boredom. I did not ask the NAB membership to sacrifice their business objective—namely, attracting listeners. Rather, I asked the broadcast executives to allow hosts to build an audience without being compelled to construct a political clubhouse in which every member must agree on every issue. Provide a platform to entertaining, compelling voices that might not fit the current mold.
For the sake of your stations, and the nation.
AFTERWORD
I recently reread my speech to the NAB and realized that it’s even timelier now than when I delivered it. Here are the key thoughts I offered that still stand up:
I’m suggesting that now is the time for us to chart a new path. To embrace a new model that can benefit both our industry and the nation. . . .
I’m not asking nor recommending you sacrifice your business priorities—namely, attracting listeners and viewers.
But that you give consideration to entertaining voices that can expand the tent.
Sure, we need our P1s—but are we excluding a potentially larger market share?
In so doing, not only might you grow your market share, but you will also affect the tone in Washington and hence the future of the country.
We can really do our kids a favor.
My time spent in Chicago to deliver the NAB keynote address to a gathering of talk radio leaders is memorable for several reasons. First, my audience was warm but afterward did not heed my advice to break out of the polarized approach to talk radio for the sake of both the industry and the national discourse.
Second, while in the Windy City, I had a nasty encounter with the president of my then syndicator, who had grown increasingly uncomfortable with my unwillingness to deliver a doctrinaire, conservative, ideologically driven program. We reached a breaking point a year later when I was afforded a 30-minute, one-on-one interview in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama in the final days of his campaign against Mitt Romney. Rather than promoting that conversation, my syndicator sought to hide it from the very stations that were carrying my program, which provided impetus for me to finally (voluntarily) move my program to SiriusXM.
Third, ironically, at the same confab where I was delivering the keynote speech, I was nominated for a Marconi Award, the radio equivalent of an Emmy or Academy Award. I was nominated in the Best Network/Syndicated Host category. The other nominees were Bob and Sheri, Clark Howard, Laura Ingraham, and Ryan Seacrest. Seacrest won. Smerconish out!
LESSONS FROM THE CHEAP SEATS
Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, January 27, 2012
I HAVEN’T BEEN INTERESTED in the 76ers since the run at the Lakers in 2001. However, despite lacking a superstar, this year’s young, passionate team is off to a tremendous start in an abbreviated season.
Two weeks ago tonight, I had dinner at a restaurant on 9th Street in South Philadelphia with one of our sons, who shares my interest. As we ate, he used his phone to keep tabs on the Sixers’ score. They were host to the Washington Wizards and were up 54–40 when the game reached halftime, just as I paid our dinner bill.
“Let’s go watch the second half,” I said as we reached our car. He thought I meant on television. Instead, 10 minutes later, I wheeled into the lot at the Wells Fargo Center. Our late arrival was about to reap some reward.
“I just closed my register,” said a woman at the parking entrance. “Just park anywhere.”
I figured there’d be somebody outside with tickets at a deep discount, but there was no one around. So we headed into the ticket office where the seats, unlike the parking, remained at full price.
“Just get the $15 seats,” said my son. I told him that I could spend more, and we could sit downstairs. He objected. I admired his frugality and did as I was told.
So we rode the escalator up, found our seats, and settled in for the third quarter. The Sixers have been on a tremendous roll lately and were having another good night. The attendance, however, had yet to catch up with their box score. As they continue to win, that will surely change. But from our perch high above, we could see plenty of seats on the lower level.
“Do you want to sit downstairs for the final quarter?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” was the abrupt reply.
“But look at all the room. We can just slide down late in the game.”
“No, Dad, these are our seats,” came the reply. So we stayed put until the final buzzer.
The Sixers won the game, 120–89. In fact, because they also scored more than 100 points, we were entitled to a pair of Big Macs the next day just for showing our ticket stubs.
What a great night: The company of a son. Good food. Free parking. Cheap seats. Sixers basketball. And lunch the next day.
But since then, I’ve been debating what my son’s contentedness with sitting upstairs says about him, and what my offer to “slide” downstairs says about my parenting.
Of course, I’m proud that he wanted to honor his real seat location, because I’d like to think the decision revealed his moral compass. When I told this story on my radio program, a woman quickly called and said, “Get him to run for office.” Ethics, after all, will play a large role in his future path.
True, but he will also need to “ask for the order.” That’s my way of describing a willingness to take some risks, push the envelope, be a bit aggressive and adventurous, so long as it is not at someone else’s expense. Some have told me I should be embarrassed for having suggested that we move to a better location—for the record, I am not. (Maybe it’s because I remember being a small boy and having my father push my brother and me through the turnstiles at Franklin Field holding only two tickets.) Besides, I was not asking my son to join me in displacing someone from their location—but rather, to watch the final few minutes in a better and vacant seat.
He would have none of it.
On this night, at least, he was more his mother’s son: cautious, lacking envy, and uncomfortable at the thought of occupying something that was not his. Those traits are going to serve him well. But hopefully he’s got a little of dad’s chutzpah, too. Because to fulfill his potential, I’m convinced he’ll need both.
By the way, the Sixers are host to the Charlotte Bobcats tonight. We’ll be there, sitting on the lower level, which tonight are our assigned seats.
AFTERWORD
Later that same basketball season, I met and befriended the Sixers’ then-CEO Adam Aron, and his wife, Abbe. When I first met Adam at a Sixers game, I was again accompanied by my eldest son. Adam, having read this column, was quick to needle me while complimenting my son for his decision to stick with the cheap seats for which we’d paid. He then invited us into the owner’s box. This time, my son didn’t object.
The following season the Sixers hired Sam Hinkie as the team’s general manager, and so began “The Process.” Hinkie’s already gone, but we’re still optimistic that the groundwork he laid will soon pay off, and by most accounts, at least one legitimate NBA star has already come of it. Aron, meanwhile, is now the CEO of AMC Entertainment. He and Abbe remain my friends.
BURSTING A CLASS BUBBLE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, February 10, 2012
CHARLES MURRAY thinks I live in a bubble, and it worries him. He believes that people like me are influential but detached, and that the level of isolation in which we live jeopardizes the well-being of society.
When he looks at me, here is what he sees: Main Line home, Ivy League law degree, kids in private schools, a Stairmaster in my office, and no domestic beer in my fridge.
I tried to convince him that he is mistaken, highlighting that I grew up in Doylestown in a three-bedroom, one-bath home (with only a tub, no shower) on a quarter-acre lot. I worked at McDonald’s when I was 16 and attended the Central Bucks public schools.
So we put the issue of my detachment to a quiz contained in his new book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. He told me the quiz was designed to show members of the new upper class how isolated they
are. The questions, he said, could be answered by ordinary Americans in a heartbeat. Here are a few:
Have you ever walked on a factory floor?
Who is Jimmie Johnson?
Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?
Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform?
Have you ever watched an Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Judge Judy show all the way through?
(My total score was a 42; 77 is a typical score for a lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood.)
Murray, a libertarian affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, is best known as the coauthor of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. His new book is equally provocative. The focus is on class formation, which Murray writes is “a new form of segregation.” Murray argues that America is coming apart at the seams, not from race but from class, which is why he focused on whites in his book, despite believing that the trends do cross racial boundaries.
When he looks at America, Murray sees a divide between locales such as Belmont, Massachusetts, and Fishtown, in the Lower Northeast of Philadelphia. While he fictionalizes both locales, the elements on which he draws are accurate—just exaggerated. The upper-middle-class residents of Belmont still embody the virtues of our Founders, while the white, working-class in Fishtown are sliding down the socioeconomic ladder. A large part of the problem is that the people in Belmont are no longer connected to the residents of Fishtown, denying the latter a needed form of social order.
Marriage, work, and community are important constituents of a satisfying life, says Murray, but those institutions are collapsing in Fishtown. This week he told me:
We’ve always had classes in the United States. There have always been rich and poor folks who had somewhat different customs and mores. But there used to be a lot of interchange and it used to be that even the rich folks had grown up as either poor or middle class and knew what it was like personally. All of that is changing big time. It’s going to get worse.
The danger seen by Murray is that power is concentrated in the hands of the new upper class, which lacks the requisite empathy to make decisions for the remainder of society. Given the impact the new upper class has on the economy and culture, it would be a “good idea,” he told me, if its members could empathize with the rest of the country.
Murray views this as a continuation of themes he wrote about in The Bell Curve 17 years ago, a book that created a flash point because of its treatment of race and intelligence. He said:
Brains are worth a lot more in the marketplace than they used to be. So when you get to these divisions of wealth, it’s not that somebody is stealing money but that it is worth more to have a lot of ability in certain kinds of intellectual areas than it was 50, 60 years ago, and that’s going to continue. And as that happens, you get development of what I call super zips—very affluent, extremely well-educated zip codes in which pretty much everybody is alike.
But his biggest concern is not my contemporaries. It’s their children, who he believes are being raised completely detached from a society that they are being groomed to lead.
I asked him, sight unseen, to describe my bubble. He told me that the people who live around me don’t watch TV like the rest of the country (“Some brag they don’t even have a TV or use it only to watch videos or DVDs”), are more concerned about their weight, have different dietary and child-rearing practices, and bear very little relationship to mainstream Americans.
Sounds as if he just stepped off the R5.
AFTERWORD
Four years before the 2016 presidential race, this was my wake-up call. Too bad I missed it. I was dismissive of Donald Trump’s campaign from start to finish. I never thought he’d run. After he announced, I thought he’d never file the requisite financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. I was certain his appalling comments about John McCain as a POW would sink him. I believed his proposed Mexican wall would crush him with Hispanics. I figured his “blood coming out of her wherever” comment about Megyn Kelly would ruin him with women. (And when it didn’t, that the Access Hollywood Bush tape certainly would.) I believed that Hillary Clinton beat him in at least two of three debates. And despite his jumping all those hurdles, I still thought he’d tap out at about 240 electoral votes in a best-case scenario.
Had I thought more about Murray’s book in a political context, I would have better anticipated the educational divide that defined the 2016 presidential election. Here’s something to think about that tracks Murray’s analysis, and I give credit to David Wasserman at the Cook Political Report for the legwork. It’s the Cracker Barrel versus Whole Foods way of viewing the 2016 race. And the statistics from this viewpoint are telling.
The nation has roughly 3,100 counties. As of the 2016 election, there were 412 Whole Foods spread out in 184 counties, and 642 Cracker Barrels, located in 484 counties. They overlap in only about 90 counties, so they clearly build in different areas to reach different demographics. I’m convinced they take political data into account when they decide where to build. There is one of each in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, close to where I live, in Montgomery County. If you live in close proximity to both as I do, chances are you live in a swing area, like the Philly burbs.
Well, in the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump won 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel, and only 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods—a 54 percent gap. In 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush, the gap between the same counties was just 19 percent. It has grown steadily since the 1992 election, but the 2016 race represented the largest jump between two presidential races. Hillary Clinton surely paid a price for figuratively campaigning in Whole Foods Nation to the detriment of Cracker Barrel Country. And I’m sure Charles Murray would say that too many Americans who regularly patronize Whole Paycheck, er, I mean Whole Foods, need to spend more time eating at Cracker Barrel.
A SHATTERED SPIRIT
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, June 3, 2012
“I’M ALBERT MILEY and I’m from Warminster, Pennsylvania I want you to contact my attorney Geofrey Fieger.”
So read the note pinned on “Buddy” Miley by his younger brother Jimmy when Buddy was left in the care of a physician. But this was no hospital or medical office. It was Room 146 of the Quality Inn in Livonia, Michigan. And there was no insurance co-pay, just the payment of $46. And the physician was Jack Kevorkian.
Buddy Miley, 41, went to Michigan to die. By the time he got to Kevorkian, Miley had been suffering for 23½ years, significantly longer than the 17 he’d enjoyed while able to move his limbs.
On an overcast Saturday afternoon in September 1973, Miley, a standout quarterback for William Tennent High, was injured while running what had seemed like a routine option play. Tennent was playing a Suburban One League game at Plymouth-Whitemarsh. Miley, standing 6-foot-2 and weighing 170 pounds, gained a few yards before sustaining a blow that would leave him incapacitated. He suffered severe damage at C4/C5 of his vertebrae, or, in the vernacular of the time, he broke his neck.
Miley was initially the recipient of an overwhelming outpouring of sympathy. Eagles quarterback Roman Gabriel visited in the hospital. Eagles general manager Jimmy Murray arranged for a “hug on the telephone” from the quarterback Roger Staubach. Joe Namath, whom Miley idolized, sent signed memorabilia. Dallas coach Tom Landry visited the family home. Alan Ameche, a Heisman Trophy winner, sent Miley’s parents on a Caribbean vacation.
But time moved slowly for Miley, who was in constant pain and required full care while living with his parents. His debilitating condition placed his large, tight-knit family under a tremendous burden, particularly his mother, Rosemarie. Nearly two decades after the accident, her frustration was evident in a letter she penned to Sports Illustrated. It began: “My son broke his neck 19 years ago playing high school football. Since then, our home has been hell on earth.”
That’s when Miley’s plight became known to Mark Kram Jr., a reporte
r at the Philadelphia Daily News, who wrote a newspaper cover story titled “19 Years of Hell.”
Kram now has meticulously charted the entire Miley tragedy in a new book called Like Any Normal Day. The result is a poignant account of family love and brotherly devotion. As Kram writes, the trip to Michigan was not the first taken together by Buddy and Jimmy. They’d previously flown to the shrine at Lourdes, France, in a “Hail Mary” bid for healing. The book also introduces us to Karen Kollmeyer, who would have had a first date with Buddy the night of the accident. While over the years their relationship ebbed and flowed, it was Karen whom Buddy talked to by phone while at the hotel awaiting Kevorkian.
Not long after that telephone farewell, there was a knock on the door, and in walked Dr. Death, wearing a black hat and dark glasses, and accompanied by two associates.
“So you’re the celebrity?” Kevorkian said to Miley in recognition of Kram’s Daily News cover story, which had been sent to him. And then, while his associates prepared Buddy to die, Kevorkian went into the hotel bathroom to prepare his lethal concoction. He emerged minutes later with a homemade device he called the Thanatron, which consisted of three glass bottles on a small frame, with a button that Buddy could use to hasten his own death while lying on the hotel bed.
It was now time for Jimmy to leave his older brother and fly home to Philadelphia.
Later than night, at the Miley family home on Acorn Drive in Warminster, Buddy’s parents and siblings gathered to mourn while fearing the unknown. Would Jimmy get in trouble? Would the cops show up and lead him off in handcuffs? Thankfully, neither occurred.
As for Kevorkian, he died one year ago today after having been hospitalized for pneumonia and a kidney-related ailment. He was 83. Published accounts said that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was played for him at the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, so he could hear the music he loved as he was dying.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 27