On Human Bondage

Over the weekend, the Globe finally succeeded where many had failed. It figured out how much Howie Carr makes at WRKO: $790,000! Carr, as you know, has been embroiled in a nasty standoff with ‘RKO since he announced he would be leaving to host a morning show on WTTK FM. His show is still running, though his soon-to-be-former employer and he have been threatening to sue each other to smithereens over the ‘TTK business.

Media critic Dan Kennedy’s initial response was that Howie is a hypocrite because he’s constantly trashing public servants for grasping for a bit more money, either in their checks or their pensions, while the host himself is out decrying his mammoth RKO contract as a form of “indentured servitude.” I disagree (as I did on Kennedy’s blog), thinking that WRKO is a private company, and they wouldn’t be paying Carr that sort of money if he wasn’t worth it for them.

Carr, as a columnist and a radio host, has made his name supposedly speaking truth to power, and undoubtedly thought he could play the same game during his contract spat, standing up to his corporate (AM radio) overlords, but that shit doesn’t fly when a big chunk of your listeners are working class. You just look like a self-dramatizing diva.

And an increasingly lazy one, if you look at the recent quality of his columns and shows (here’s a winner), his reliance on the same old jokes, the same old targets, you get a sense of the extent to which this scourge of hacks has become a hack himself. Howie’s salary may not come from public coffers, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s devolved into the media equivalent of a dancing monkey. If Tom Finneran tried a stunt even remotely like what Carr is doing now, crying poor and oppressed while clearing nearly a mil for working three hours a day, Howie would wring five years worth of columns out of it. We’d be hearing about Tommy Taxes’ Kiss in the Mail every day for the rest of our lives.