KDKA loses Pirates broadcast

This story relates to our discussion this week about radio. KDKA Radio has been carrying Pittsburgh Pirates baseball broadcasts since 1921. But the team has dropped the old-school AM station in favor of a Clear Channel affiliate, ending one of the longest running broadcast partnerships in sports. Here's the story from the Pgh Post Gazette.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721380-63.stm

Fox Car Giveaway Story

Here's the story Mike referred to in his post.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/15448166.htm?source=rss&channel=charlotte_news

I first saw the story on the "Newsblues" listserv. Here's their version:

Fox Sports did a bad thing to a good man on national TV, and Charlotte Observer sports writer Scott Fowler did something about it.

During a meaningless pre-season game between the NFL's Carolina Panthers and the Miami Dolphins, the Fox announcers promised to give away a car to a deserving fan. Sideline reporter Tony Siragusa searched the stands and settled on rabid Panther fan Greg 'Catman' Good, who works as a youth counselor when he's not dressed in an electric blue wig and a black-and-blue cape.

Good needed a new car badly.

Siragusa told him he had won...then handed him a toy Porsche. "I thought I had won a real car," Good said, bewildered and upset.

That's when sports writer Fowler got involved. He wrote about it and demanded that Fox Sports do the right thing. Fox executives debated the bad joke and issued an apology.
"That's lame," wrote Fowler, who continued to blast Fox in his columns. He says he "was bombarded by close to 1,000 e-mails and phone calls in eight hours." Several attorneys offered their services.

Two weeks later, the network relented. Fox Sports Chairman and CEO David Hill called Fowler personally and promised to fly to Charlotte today from Los Angeles and give Good the keys to a new Ford F-150 pickup. He called the practical joke "an appalling piece of misjudgment."
"I take the reputation of Fox Sports very seriously," Hill said, "and I don't want it to be sullied. Once I heard about the Charlotte Observer story, I believed something needed to be done quickly and unilaterally." (two weeks later)

Heads will roll, we predict.

Big Blog of Balls

Big Blog of Balls
First of all, Stephanie Tanner had a nasty split-finger fastball. Second, Joey Gladstone should have been kept at least 500 feet away from all children, for everybody's safety. Anyways, the article that Prof. Burns sent about Fox's "bad joke" was pretty funny. If you didn't read it, it was about Fox promoting a free car giveaway during a preseason football game. So they ended up getting a guy all excited and asked him if he was ready for his car, only to give him a matchbox car. The guy thought it was just a sample of what his car looked like, but that was all he got. After a newspaper picked up the story, Fox admitted it's 'poor tasting joke' and gave the man a real car.
How did they think that giving away a mini-car instead of a real one would be acceptable. That's like telling one of those poor children (the one's on the commercials)from a third world country that they are getting adopted and coming to America, only to arrive at the Neverland Ranch with M.J.: it's just not right. They should spend more time on the game and less time trying to be funny. And how is Tony Siragusa allowed to talk? He played football but has nothing inciteful to say about the game. My 80-year old grandmother who thinks the Red Sox and the Patriots are the same team knows more than he does. Anyways, that's all I got. Go Pats.
12:59 PM