No Lipstick for the Dodger pig

Matt Welch writes:

Of all the lowliest (and most punishing) forms of journalism there are in our marvelous culture of media plenty, post-game baseball call-in shows possibly rank in the lowest quintile. And I say that as someone who probably spends more man-hours per annum listening to "Angel Talk" than reading The New Yorker and The Atlantic combined.

The problems are endless, and structural — callers ranging in sophistication from pre-T-baller to Don Zimmer, screeners failing to weed out monomaniacs and drunks, and hosts trapped between serving as goodwill ambassador to the fans and loyalist defender of the team. As the fine Dodgers/Angels blogger Rob McMillin put it recently, "Sports talk shows are a thankless job, but it’s a heck of a lot easier if the team is in first place."

There is a root conflict of interest foreign to almost every journalistic job except for the peculiar position of ombudsman — the primary target of the journalism either pays the radio host’s salary directly (as in the case of the Angels’ Terry Smith), or pays the host’s station a pile of money to broadcast games (as happens with "Dodger Talk" host Bob Harvey). It’s hard enough to pursue journalistic fairness in the absence of financial considerations; next to impossible when the subject of your story holds the whip hand.

Which Harvey learned (or more likely, re-learned) the hard way last week, when Dodgers PR director Josh Rawitch called him during his broadcast to label Harvey’s show "an embarrassment." The complaint, as Rawitch laid out on his blog the next day, goes like this: