Thom Brennaman, welcome to the unemployment line

Oh hell yeah. WGN was even more overt about it. The producers knew Harry liked the female form and that he might even comment on it.

"There's a cutie in the stands ..."

 

LOL Does anyone ever notice the guy in the "FUCK U" shirt?

 

"I had no idea it was so rooted in hate and violence"

C'mon now, Thom. No idea?

 

I believe it was WGN Cubs' producer Arne Harris who thought the key to good baseball production was: two cute women, then one kid in every crowd shot.

 

This is great.
I have a question for TV people. How did this make it on air? I know the famous seven-second delay isn’t feasible for sports, but is there any delay in transmission in sports?

 

One of the things you'll notice in sports teevee production: almost no women camera operators or videographers. And relatively few in the control room.

That absence being one of the reasons sexist bullshit like this persists.

 

To be honest, the rare times I see or hear the word, the first thing my mind goes to is Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

 

The seven second delay isn't used nearly as often as people think. I've worked in live TV for 30 years. I could damn near count the number of times I've had a delay on one hand. (Car chases and protests. I think that's it.)

The delay is a giant technological pain in the ass to work with. No one is going to use one out of fear that your experienced play-by-play guy is going to drop a slur on air.

 

I've never seen a radio station use the eight-second delay for anything other than a show in which you've got audience participation (meaning live callers in some form, talk show/swap shop/remote broadcast). And even then, it requires coordination between the on-air talent and the board producer. It's the producer's job to drop the delay (thus eliminating the offending content) and pick up the talent again, who hopefully carries on as if nothing has happened.

When it works correctly, the listener never even notices. It's a smooth transition, and the cool thing at the last two big city stations, the delay is automatically stretched back out digitally to eight seconds, unlike back when we were using an eight-second cartridge to create that gap in analog, and you could hear dead air until it caught up.

When the delay doesn't work, like when one caller calls Doug Williams the best n----r quarterback in the NFL AND another caller asks if Tracey Austin has a tight p---y in THE SAME THREE-HOUR POSTGAME listened to by several tens of thousands of people on the Florida Gators Radio Network and the board op missed both of them (!), that's when the station manager storms into the newsroom on a Monday morning and reams your ass out in front of 20 other people who have no idea what just happened.

Yep, welcome to my world, where my career nearly ended before it began.

 

Welcome to Dallas radio, where the dump button is pushed and the co-hosts bust the perpetrator's balls the rest of the week with the undumped (bleeped-out) offending comment. Usually just a run-of-the-mill curse word, not a slur. Last person to get popped for that was Mike Bacsik and that was for a Twitter post. He ended up at a competitor station shortly afterward.

 

Listened to a snippet of Jim Rome and he had it perfectly, if you're apologizing and you use the word "IF [I offended you]" then its not an apology.