A CHICAGO RADIO PROGRAMMER, MITCH ROSEN, HAS RUINED THE MEDIA INDUSTRY
His words this week — “We’re committed to having top-tier hosts who are respected by local teams” — trash the purpose of scrutinizing sports franchises that make boatloads of money from fans
The words that spit from my mouth, such as when Shaquille O’Neal attempts to say “Rudy Gobert is dominating,” happen after I utter Chicago is the country’s No. 3 media market. When I worked there, the city hosted national TV shows: Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer (help us), Jenny Jones, news programs at night. I was on one daily ride for eight years, ESPN’s “Around The Horn.” We had major talent in town, including Mark Giangreco on Channel 7 and radio loudmouths.
One of the charms of freewheeling communication involved sports stations firing on each other and newspapers beating each other for the day’s best stories. I don’t need to mention how often I was abused, slurred and threatened by franchises, usually those owned by Jerry Reinsdorf. That’s because I scared them. Those were teams owned by multi-millionaires soon to become billionaires. They had much to lose, in business and in image. That’s when the city deserved nationwide praise for media competition.
Today? I just read a comment that will prompt vomit from Charles Barkley and talk-show traditionalists such as Mike Francesa and Chris Russo. It came from Mitch Rosen, who has served as operations director and vice president of 670 The Score for so long that he has lost touch with the bigger world. When Rosen uses press statements to promote himself and his station, I’m tempted to wonder if he has been goaded by team bosses Jerry and Michael Reinsdorf and Tom Ricketts. He is not serving a captive audience of nine million people who tend to love sports.
“We’re committed to having top-tier hosts who are respected by local teams,” Rosen said the other day, when announcing a change to his daily lineup.
He is committed to WHAT? He wants hosts who are “respected by local teams,” the blowhard said. These are franchises making boatloads of money from fans every year and deserve to be scrutinized by local media. When they are not scrutinized — neither newspaper has a regular sports columnist, the role I filled for 17 years at the Sun-Times — folks are shortchanged by what they hear on airwaves and read online. I’ve never heard a media executive say he was trying to make teams happy. Oh, the shame.
I’ve had many thoughts on this matter. The current Sun-Times sports editor, Chris De Luca, will not publish what has been written everywhere: The flying Ishbias of Phoenix have purchased 35 percent of the White Sox. The Tribune sports editor refuses to do the same, though I emailed a news writer at the paper who insisted he’d be on the project. Do I wonder if those papers are squarely in bed with certain teams, which goes against the central purpose of questioning those in power and maintaining ethical standards. I wondered about my bosses for years, including one who referred to Reinsdorf as “Jerry.”
Do Chicago media have undesirably close associations with sports teams?
Mitch Rosen does. What is happening in other markets?
The media suck, I know. Here’s why.
On social media, I am fed regular rations of David Haugh, who hosts a morning show on The Score. He appears weekdays on the Chicago Sports Network, a minimally seen UHF provider owned by Reinsdorf that carries the dreadfully rated White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks. When Haugh was a Tribune columnist, he was boring. He is more boring on TV. He would not be on the channel if Jerry Reinsdorf and Mitch Rosen didn’t approve.
How are fans helped by such a relationship? The biggest crudball in American sports ownership joins the biggest crudball in Chicago media, the No. 3 market.
Vomit.
One of my grand ratings journeys involved beating Rosen’s station in the mid-2000s. Our radio advantage was having no relations with teams — when the White Sox didn’t want to use players, we put Cubs players on the air — and I was able to lash out about management when necessary. Late in the year, WMVP programmer Len Weiner asked me to protect the Sox and Bulls on the air. I refused, reminding him I had a four-day-a-week column. He fired me.
Vomit.
Mitch won.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.