So
Jay Severin has lost another radio gig. No one seems to care
anymore. When he lost the tkk job, there were a few comments.
The talk 1200, narry a mention. Probably has something to do
with Limbaugh on rko.
I
guess we all should have seen it coming. I wrote this when he
lost the job because of his I slept with the world spiel. I
don’t think he did. Irrelevant now, but here it is.
Predicting
the future is not given to many mortals. Oh some of us see a
bank of clouds and take the umbrella, but few rise to the level of
Warren Buffet. Yet, there is an event that if one had been
following it long enough should have been so easy to prognosticate.
Jay
Severin was a guilty pleasure for many within his station’s
range. There were blogs dedicated to bashing him by people who
could not stand an afternoon without him. The pleasure at his
end must have been short lived. Indeed, at the finish, his
audience probably consisted more of his detractors than fans.
Yet what they despised him for, his hate speech was not the most
salient feature of his show. It was there, but it was
diminishing. He had even taken to saying nice things about
gays. He had seemed to turn himself into the loving family
man, albeit with the odd oat sown of youth.
No,
Jay had another quality that he could never escape. One may
disagree on whether it was outright prevarication or Olympic Gold
level exaggeration, but it was big. Were he a fisherman, the
minnow that got away would have been turned into a trout, the trout,
a shark, and then a whale.
He
made his adventures with interns sound like he had serviced a harem
larger than a Turkish Sultan and was done in for his brag.
Think about the man. He has been caught out on boast after
boast. If he has not been awarded degrees and honors he’s
claimed, why does anyone believe he was super stud? It was not
what he did but what he said he did that he is vanished.
Some
of his foibles are well known. Probably his most famous is,
''But since journalism began, and up until the time at least that I
took my master's degree at Boston University -- and may I add
without being obnoxious, up till and including the time that I
received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online
journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism, the highest
possible award for writing on the Web -- right up to and including
that in 1998, you still had to practice journalism to be a
journalist."
Jay’s
comment was a reflection on the state of journalism, oddly enough.
Globe reporter, Scott Lehigh did the legwork and found out that
there is no such prize and that our latter day Mencken had no
Pulitzer on record. Jay had an explanation, ‘‘what I said
was, there is a prize that my editor told me is the equivalent of
the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism." The producer whom
he said told him he had won wasn’t sure what award he was talking
about and they were sitewide anyway. To call a Jay connection
nebulous is to be kind.
This
is not to say a BU grad could not win a Pulitzer, but Jay wasn’t
degreed from that school on the south bank of the Charles. Jay
Severin admitted as much in 2005 that "...
it would appear I have no degree" after the school denied
knowledge of the award. Maybe he put the frame sans sheepskin
up on the wall and said, “Hmm, I wonder what’s missing?”
Oh,
maybe his Harvard Law School vellum? Yup, He had spent time
north of the River Chuck to pursue legal studies. This was
reported in the Boston College campus newspaper, the Heights.
When queried about this, Jay had no clue except that, well, he might
have gone to a few classes as part of the BU thingee. A bit of
a stretch, but that’s the pattern.
Decades
ago, Eddie Andelman said of Jean Shepherd of Christmas Story fame,
“He had a longer childhood than Orphan Annie.” A dated
reference to many, but Severin has had a longer childhood than Jean
Shepherd as it has never ended. The Heights also reported, "As
a young person, Severin was arrested over 50 times while fighting
for civil rights."
Again,
maybe a stretch? After all, Martin Luther King in his career
was arrested only four times. Fifty times are a lot of
collars and for someone who sounds so self absorbed, it makes one
wonder. Still, There may have been a demonstration that went
by Jay’s car while a ticket was being written and he counts that
as a pinch and inflated it a lot.
When
most boomers were working summer jobs, Woodstock happened.
Kids who were pumping gas while waiting to get back to BC or
Northeastern heard of the wild party in a New York sward and many
would later claim to have been there. It was a loaves and
fishes field. Give Jay credit, he’s one of the few of his
generation who does not claim to have been in attendance.
Maybe
that’s because he had he had tasted blood the year before during
the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. He claims to have been
at the Battle of Grant Park. The then 17 year old was trawling
record stores and had hardly heard of events, but no matter, he
would become fast friends with Abbie and Jerry and who is there to
gainsay it now. Who knows, it may be true, as it appears he
was at Abbie Hoffman’s Worcester memorial. That will always
be the question about Jay, is it Memorex?
So
is it possible that Jay was the man-god to all the aspiring female
politicos? Maybe, but like his claim to be more than the
B-grade political operative Scott Lehigh pegged him as, the evidence
is slight.
Still,
some of his narrative is indisputable. Mother Jones in 1983
called him a competitor of his former employer, David Garth.
Just to be able to keep the lights on in a field as tough as
political consulting is a feat.
