I had originally started this post on Monday in the afternoon to discuss the Tony Kornheiser show on Monday. As you know if you happened to read the original audacity post, )which it looks like about 12 people did) that I mentioned his comments about Hannah Storm and the half hearted apology he gave afterwards.
Of course any of his longtime listeners didn’t blink an eye at the time of the original comments, as he has made comments about Hannah’s outfits as well as Hoda’s and Kathy Lee’s and every other freak show middle aged “news babe” on morning TV. So it came as quite the surprise that he was apologizing on Friday’s show, although not too surprising that Hannah might have heard about it through the ESPN grapevine and it needed to be quashed.
Monday’s show started with another apology, which I found very unusual, and which first made me think about writing another media watch aka. Audacity post to talk about this, although I couldn’t imagine that it was really going anywhere so I didn’t think about it much until right be fore the end of the first hour when he usually has the PTI preview he said something about a format change in the radio show and skipped that segment. Now, I’m about to sound like your D-bag friend that claimed to know Bruce Willis was a ghost 5 minutes into the sixth sense, but the combination of the phrase “undisclosed amount of time” to describe the “format change” and the missing PTI segment made me suspect he had been suspended. Of course he had joked almost all Friday that he was going to get fired, but that seemed beyond absurd at the time.
Later on Monday, when he was in fact not present at PTI it became obvious that there was some kind of suspension in place. At that point I had written most of what you had already in the first two paragraphs, although with a slightly different perspective. On Tuesday morning in the first couple minutes of the show he disclosed that he had been suspended and then played his usual woe is me card and what a terrible day it is shtick. I have been contemplating whether or not it was a mistake not to post this Monday night when I first wrote it and suspected a suspension. My thoughts were that, I didn’t know and it would look stupid to our 7 regular readers if I were wrong and it wasn’t a suspension and that secondly this isn’t a news site, we do feature type posts about sports and sports media and a breaking story isn’t as interesting as a posts afterwards that can dissect all the angles. So maybe I missed the chance to “break” this story, although posting on the internet what you hear on a radio show is hardly breaking, and get a million hits, but I took this route instead.
I’ve decided to end the inside baseball part of this posts as I believe it is the longest one yet and actually get into my opinion on the suspension and peoples reaction to it in a second post later today. Which will focus on the comments themselves, which I can’t even remember, ESPN’s reaction and my take on their internal politics and finally the two reactions to the story that I found most interesting, Dan Levy's over at On The Dl and Dead Spin's take that it was mostly about his Berman comments and not the Hannah stuff. So until later, keep the back bacon frying.
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