Curtis Sliwa: Pinstripes Come First
At least there’s no longer any dispute: Curtis Sliwa has made it clear that New York-area topics will come first, even as he embarks on a shaky national syndication bid.
After assuring Boston-area media that he would be live and local for our area during his WTKK evening show, it’s now clear that was a lie.
But he’s also trying to have it both ways, claiming he knows the streets of all of these cities thanks to (largely failed) efforts to bring Guardian Angels here and elsewhere.
It’s one thing for New York to tolerate Curtis’s decades-long scam, but expecting other cities to follow suit is ridiculous.
Worse, in a New York Daily News interview, Sliwa twice sucks up to Barack Obama, in a move that will please left-leaning managers at these stations.
If that wasn’t enough, Sliwa reveals he knows nothing about where news-talk listeners live, mistakenly believing they reside in large cities, rather than suburbs and rural areas:
Curtis Sliwa’s vocal his new show stays local
By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERTuesday, November 11th 2008
Curtis Sliwa of WABC (770 AM) insists that he will remain “live and local,” even as his new evening show is carried by stations in multiple cities.
While WABC wasn’t officially confirming any changes yesterday, Sliwa left his 5-6 a.m. and 10 a.m.-noon shifts and did 9 p.m.-1 a.m. - which will push out Laura Ingraham’s tape-delayed show and cut Bob Grant to an hour.
That slot lets Sliwa go live on WTKK in Boston, then on tape-delay over KABC in Los Angeles. He’s also been carried, he notes, on WABC sister station WMAL in D.C.
He says “the show is working out great” for WTKK and KABC. “They love it.”
WABC’s two morning shifts yesterday were handled by supersub Mark Simone, who said on the air, “I’m just in here for a while.”
“Management didn’t want me doing three shifts,” said Sliwa. “I agreed to do those morning shifts because they needed someone there during the election. Now that the election is over, this other opportunity has come up, so this is what I’m doing right now.”
There’s a major debate in radio over whether talk radio fares better with “live and local” shows or with well-known syndicated hosts. Sliwa says with him, listeners can get both.
“My show feels live in every city because I know those cities so well from working there with the Guardian Angels,” he says. “I tie a local story into a larger issue, and it entertains everybody, which is what talk radio needs to do.
“I can do 10 minutes on Eliot Spitzer and everyone gets it.”
It helps, he says, that “I’m not like a lot of my colleagues. I don’t talk straight politics. I talk about what’s going on in the streets - and in an Obama presidency, that’s important, because many of the issues over the next four years will be urban.
“I can tune into those issues and tie them together. I can help radio reach the generation that helped make Barack Obama President.”
Sadly for Sliwa, his new syndicator is Citadel’s ABC Radio, which is completely broke and not expected to survive. But for now, he can help the company fill airtime at Citadel’s affiliates on the cheap.
In Boston, however, WTKK has no connection to Citadel. So what’s in it for them? Why help the company survive, when its failure could mean an opportunity for owner Greater Media to pick up stations in Providence, New York and across the country for pennies on the dollar?
Having Curtis Sliwa on the air in Boston makes about as much sense as opening a Yankees fan store on Yawkey Way.
7 comments November 11th, 2008