What is the fascination Jimmy Severino aka Jay Severin

The few readers who arrive at this forlorn venue arrive after searching for Jay Severin.  I have no idea why he is so popular as I found him a mediocrity at best.  That he has landed a gig at the Blaze only reinforces that opinion.

Update: We have not mentioned the man for awhile now and it seems he had vanished from the face of the Earth.  Actually, gravity has not released him, but he has come down in the world.  He has vanished from the elite town of Manchester-By-The -Sea and now resides in Ipswich, not a venue of poverty, but neither is it as posh as his prior digs.

Saps we are and admit to feelings of compassion for the man.

Still, he may be better now, but as I have not listened since he left the air in Massachusetts. Below are the two posts everyone searches for.  

The originals have been deleted as this one will after a bit of time.  Without the ever popular Jay posts, no one will come here.  Oh Well.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Jay Severin gone again. It was so predictable. Still, I shall miss the non-entity formerly known as Jimmy Severino.

             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.

In 1985, jay is part of a triumvirate that is working to get Bush père ready for his run in1988.  The new york magazine article pegs them as “the only people who ever left david garth's organization to establish a republican agency.”  THE Problem is there is another severin in the threesome.  The firm known as Severin Avilles Associates, Inc, included a Kathleen Cooney Severin .  She was not jay’s half sister.  Using French in this paragraph already, another indo-european tongue is in order.  Frau is the word we are looking for.  So it was according to a 1993 new york times article about Rudy Giulani that mentioned their status as man and wife and tapped Kathleen as firm president.

So how does one think the conversation at the dinner table went, “ya know dear, that new intern looks like she needs a bit of mentoring.”  Hmmm.  Not too high on the likelihood scale that.

 ah but a mere four years later, the New York Times noted, jay would be strolling down the aisle with a new Mrs. Severin, Renee Klock.  He is now chairman of Severin Media less Avilles.  Though there is no definitive evidence from the wedding announcement, it is doubtful that the new wife had been a mentoree at the firm.

So there is a four year window where he might have had his romp.  In all probability, it was likely to be only a couple of years when Kathleen was out of the picture and Renee arrived.

So was there that bevy of eager young operatives willing to give it up so that they could learn from the master on the campaign trail?  This is what jay wanted his listeners to believe.  That he cut a huge swath through maidenhood is open to question.

Friday, February 22, 2008

There's one good thing to say about the policy of de-instituionalization.

Those who read a previous post on Jay Severin realize his limiltless capacity for hyperbole. Not the least his claim to have been awarded a masters in journalism at Boston University.

Well, Jay almost killed me last night. I only get to listen to him while driving due to reception issues here in the exurbs. About 4:08 PM, after the news he opened by stating "When I pursued my masters at BU." I almost hit a tree, I could not see as I was laughing so hard. I guess it's no longer. "When I took my masters."

Rich Aucoin of The Truth About Jay Severin also "noticed Jay's not-so-subtle-yet-somehow-seamless switch from "took" to "pursued."" and cautioned me "to leave several car lengths between you and the car in front of you between the hours of 3 and 7."

Of course he was leading into a discussion of the lack of ethics of the grey lady.

There is speculation that one area talk host told a blooper on his resume and will pay for it. Some have guessed it might be Jay. Nah, his cv is all whoppers. If they haven't sent him packing by now, he's safe.

And, I'd hate to see him go. He's nuts, but it's great schtick.