I actually frame this as one of my most obsessive subjects that I don’t have an answer to. How in the hell could one of public media’s most respective personalities be friends with one of the most trashiest people on the AM band of area radio? Also why is there no video airchecks of Howie Carr as a reporter at WNEV (pre WHDH Ch 7), WGBH or heck even WLVI? I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I suspected the way Howie Carr has been a populist-conservative sell-out since late 2014, that his WRKO days (late 90s to late 2014) was more of a stick to be a center-right, and the present days and his days before WRKO was his true self.

I recall listening to Howie for the first time after the infamous firing of Lydon at WBUR. From 1994 to early 2001, he created and hosted The Connection. When was let go by the mismanagement; he became the story across all the Boston media outlets. The firing was considered to be scandalous, and it’s half-archival, WGBH-TV did many pieces on the saga on Beat The Press, and yes Howie did opine on the days that followed his firing. Lydon ironically had been in a very competitive non-commercial media market. WBUR dominated a majority of NPR’s news content, while WGBH-TV dominated most of PBS’ overall content, but WGBH radio was the bastard child of WBUR, and except for owning a license of an upper UHF commercial station in the 90s, their experience was non-com radio. until they built themselves a local competitor 11/12 years ago, while WBUR historically lacked content of Boston nature for just the WBUR audience. Much like how WGBH-TV was in the 1990s, over-compensated on the national programming at the cost of local content.

In the last 20 years, Howie, while downplayed non-commercial media, has gone to full deification in Boston Herald columns, with a Bart Simpson attitude. In the last couple years, he spends more than 5 months annually in Palm Beach, Florida, where today he lost touch of the local press as if they are on the same strata as the mainstream media, and lumping in the commercial stations as the evil empire. Not only that he will Tweet and pee on WGBH directly when they are required to report to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts their salary of their staff on an annual basis (since it’s non profit) and try to destroy the present host of Greater Boston because he’s the company’s highest earner.

I don’t mean to drone on, let’s go to a decade ago when Whitey Bulger, the notorious mobster in Boston was captured in the Left Coast, and the two gentlemen talk about the days, as late as the mid 1990s, where the Winter Hill Gang had terrorized certian neighborhoods of Boston. His brother, Billy was the long time president of the Massachusetts Senate, of which in that sense, he was a political mob. When you play Part 2, you hear a possible reason why The Ten O’ Clock News was canceled on WGBH-TV as the station had ran reasonable, but somewhat critical pieces against the political brother of Whitey.

What makes a trashy populous-right of center talker and a left of center, philosophical thinker be bonded like this? I wonder if the two are still friends given the sewage that has come out of Howie’s mouth since 2015. I don’t like to name-call people on either side so liberally. Howie became obscenely toxic – so much I listen to Howie on podcasts, an hour clip, 4 times a year, and I don’t feel like I am missing a lot. That tells you how trashy the media is these days.