Mike Barnicle
But I repeat myself. In any case, listen to Barnicle whining about soccer.
Via Garrett Quinn, who fumes:
... Mike if you're going to do a commentary about a soccer game you should at least bother to find out what league you're talking about. Instead you give us the same old tired Jim Rome bullshit about how it's boring and for kids. Give me a break. You probably just stole one of his commentaries. Isn't that how you made a living at the Globe, anyway? ...
This morning on MSNBC Morning Joe in a segment about a CNBC documentary, Mike Barnicle poses a question about the role of Congress in the financial crisis. But he can't do it without fabricating quotations of members of Congress with words more likely to be heard at a Red Sox Yankees game:
"You people suck whatever......"
are the words he invented and put into the mouths of Congressmen and Congresswomen who questioned bank executives yesterday.
Two things:
I'm not sure but is Barnicle saying that he and other media personalities should have the exclusive right to be bloviating blowhards?
Sure, they didn't have Princess Leia begging Obi-Wan Kenobi for help like CNN, but they did have Mike Barnicle. Elias winces:
The abiding drawback to working the polls on election day is watching Mike Barnicle run his meat hole by the hour on MSNBC.
After a mere sixty minutes he runs out of sensible things to say and is reduced to decrying the "the 24-7 cable news culture", y'know the one that otherwise keeps the wolf far from Mike's door. ...
Brian writes:
Over the next few months, it might be fun to keep a tally of how many times Civic Disgrace Mike Barnicle talks up his friendship with the late Tim Russert. ...
The Columnist Who Will Not Die shows up on Huffington Post with a column that, as Dan Kennedy shows, probably took him five minutes to write, given that it's the same exact column he's been writing since the 1980s.
Back when he was a metro columnist, Brian McGrory would always write about Opening Day. Yesterday, his replacement in the Globe's White Guy slot, Kevin Cullen, expressed his disgust at being mistaken for a Yankee fan and a geezer (bonus points for slipping in a reference to a 1979 British labor dispute). Today, the grande dame of Boyo Columnists, Mike Barnicle Himself, weighs in (granted, at the Herald), with a Column for the Ages that complains how future generations will look back and wonder why developers ruined Fenway by building condos around it, instead of leaving it surrounded by Howard Johnsons and Burger Kings, those bastihds.
WBUR should either finally hire him so people can start donating to WGBH instead or they should announce they're not hiring him so people can stop getting heartburn.
Speaking of 'GBH, Emily Rooney kvetches about the lack of substance on local newscasts these days and fantasizes about marching into some local newsroom and shaking things up. Apparently, Rooney doesn't remember the days when WGBH had its own local newscast. Instead of complaining how vapid the commercial newscasts are, why not restart it? Isn't public television supposed to provide intelligent alternatives to commercial TV? Or has it all come down to Peter, Paul and Mary concerts during Pledge Week?
UPDATE: Looks like the site was taken down. Oh, well. It was full of Mike Barnicle's greatest hits.
If it had a Web site, it would look like this.
I'd forgotten the Mandingo quote.
Via Amy Derjue.
WBUR general manager to Barnicle haters: It's been 10 years, people, give it a rest. But while he tells Dan Kennedy he thinks Boston needs Barnicle, he doesn't say whether he's offering Barnicle a job on 'BUR.
Adam Reilly, back to blogging, reports on the interesting/depressing possibility that Mike Barnicle might wind up on WBUR, now run by Paul LaCamera, who worked with Barnicle at Channel 5 and who thinks Barnicle got a bum deal just because he plagiarized George Karlin 'n' stuff.
See if you can top this (no, of course I don't like him).
Jessica Heslam reports Barnicle doesn't want to permanently replace Don Imus on WTKK.
Mike Barnicle, the man 10,000 silver bullets can't kill, sounds almost remorseful that he has to fill in for Don Imus for at least the next two weeks (transcript via Vegacura):
... I've known Don a long time. I can tell you, as he has indicated several times today and last week, he is a good man, he is not a racist. I mean, it sounds pitiful to have to say something like that, but he's a good man. ...
Oh, David, he absolutely gets it. He, more than any of us, more than you, more than Gene, more than myself, more than a lot of people realizes that word are weapons, that the hurt that these words inflicted are deep, lasting, historical in some sense. The historical pain is resurrected here. He certainly understands that. ...
What? Mike Barnicle is writing for the Herald again? Wasn't he getting ready to march triumphantly back into the Globe newsroom when his buddy Jack Welch took over that paper and fired everybody (even Alex Beam)? Guess not.
I have never smoked a cigar with Mike Barnicle.
John Daley caught Mike "The Old Plagiarizer" Barnicle and Dan "CHB" Shaughnessy on the radio yesterday:
... Barnicle brought up "the blogging thing," and as they chuckled and guffawed away, Dan Shaughnessy chimed in that "all bloggers" are losers and frustrated journalists. And apparently, we're destroying the political system.
To borrow from their friend Imus, Can these guys be more over?
Each day Hank Morse (who?), Mike Barnicle and Dan Shaughnessy produce the most inane, unintelligible hour in the history of Boston radio. It's the closest thing to listening to a conversation at last call in Foleys, on the radio, sober, at ten in the morning. ...
Gienna readily admits she voted "yes" in our Just what the Globe needs: The return of Mike Barnicle poll. No, she writes, it's not because she doesn't remember all the stuff that got the Old Plagiarizer (and Patricia Smith) fired. It's just that she longs for the day when the Globe had columnists whom she actually looked forward to reading:
... But seriously, when was the last time you read a Globe column that was so good you cut it out of the paper and posted it on the fridge? ...
So former GE honcho Jack Welch and local ad honcho Jack Connors might try to buy the Globe - for about half what the New York Times paid for it back in 1999.
Dan Kennedy, who has been arguing for a locally owned Globe for awhile now, says this might be a case of the wrong buyers at the wrong time, even if the Times agreed to sell (which it says it's not interested in). He notes that Mike Barnicle the Undead is involved and that the prospective owners are "unsure" if they'd want boston.com:
I have to say that Times Co. ownership looks pretty good compared to the Welch crowd. Perhaps my own last name will allow me to get away with a bit of ethnic profiling, but this looks like the Revenge of the Pasty-Faced Irishmen. This is Old Boston, not New Boston - a nostalgia move, about the past rather than the future.
The Outraged Liberal calmly discusses Globe issues, including what he says is an impending upturn in the local ad market (driven in part by the new Nordstrom's at the under-construction Uber-Natick Mall) and the credibility issues the new owners would face:
... Mrs. Welch, the former AP reporter Suzy Wetlaufer, doesn't have the highest ethics rating in the business after sleeping with the married man (Welch) she was interviewing for the Harvard Business Review.
In fact, about the only person with a lower credibility rating is their pal Mike Barnicle -- dumped from two local newspapers for a combination of serial plagiarism and laziness above and beyond the call of duty. Any deal that includes a revitalized Barnicle presence in Boston is a bad one. ...
Harry at Squaring the Boston Globe though, says a new regime would bring some much needed discipline to the insufferably arrogant newspaper people now running that media zoo, such as the ones who got local pols to get involved in their contract dispute with Globe management. Also:
... It it delicious to imagine the distress that Barnicle's presence at such an early discussion might cause among the self-righteous folks on Morrissey Boulevard. ...
Nobody's approached me about the deal.
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