Marc Steiner and his firing

The firing of Marc Steiner reminds me of the firing a number of years ago of Davey Johnson, one of the strongest managers the Orioles ever had. He was one of the few who would get in the face of these spoiled, childish, superstar athletes and make them perform in a team-like way. However, the owner of the team, Peter Angelos, and Johnson clashed and Davey was shown the door.

I don't think the Orioles have had a winning season since.

Same thing happened in New York when Giuliani's Police Commissioner, William Bratton, became more popular than him.

Buz believes that Steiner was a truly outstanding jounalist who knew a lot of the players in the city; I'm sure that the right-wing fire-breathers on the other talk shows hated him. But he really had some great shows: his five-part series on Vietnam was very moving and enlightening, and his interview with Felicia Pearson, Snoop, was thought-provoking.

I think WYPR will go the way of the Orioles. Their big mistake, in my most humble opinion was expanding to 50, 000 watts and buying stations on the Eastern Shore and Frederick. People, listen, ain't nobody in Ocean City or Frederick gonna care about what happens in Baltimore--which they all hate and fear. People interested in listening to public radion in YPR's format don't really care what's going on in Frederick or OC, either. Management just drove up their fixed costs to satisfy the mantra that bigger is better, and missed their niche of the sophisticated urban, urbane listener. There are plenty of suburban oriented stations to cater to those audiences.

Oh, I'm sure Marc could have been a difficult fellow to handle, but he was your main, maybe only big product.

By the way, the introduction of this show the Signal, on Fridays in Marc's time slot, was the beginning of the end. This poor dumb retired guy could never figure out what they were talking about: I guess one had to be one of the Creative Alliance types to really get into it. I dunno.

By the way of crime tip: don't go walking too far north of the Creative Alliance at the Patterson at night. It's bandit country.