28 May 2012 - Worst Of

Bob Kelly does the links. Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle. Alex Jones makes himself look more ludicrous than usual. And then R Lee Ermey.
Dave Rabbit audio and phoner. The Donald Rumsfeld lizard question. Jesse Ventura pushes the mic away. Good interview with Clint Hill. Finishes up with the Bobby's Mesopotamian lycanthrope.

8 comments:

  1. Not that this particularly applies to today's worst of, but does anybody know the circumstances surrounding the management overhaul that Opie keeps not-so-subtly hinting at?

    A management switch probably wouldn't do much for the show, but if it keeps O&A in front of a national audience come October instead of dooming themselves - both financially and creatively - on an O&A podcast, I'm in favour of it.

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    1. Liberty Media, who own the Atlanta Braves, Starz, parts of Barnes & Noble, Viacom, Time Warner and a whole bunch of other crap has been attempting a hostile takeover.

      Back in 2009 Sirius was heading into bankruptcy and likely being taken over by Dish Network. Liberty's owner John Malone was running DirecTV at the time so he invested 530 million with Sirius to keep Dish out. This made Liberty the biggest shareholder at 40%. Nobody else has over 5%.

      Malone isn't happy with how the company has been run. He currently has 5 chairs on the board of directors and he's trying to do whatever he can to get the majority of the chairs so Liberty will be running the company.

      They applied for "de facto" control of the company a while back but the FCC denied the application a couple of weeks ago. Now it seems they're trying to make some deals with other shareholders to buy up enough stock to get 50.1% and take control.

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    2. Oh, and I have no idea where the guy below is getting NBC crap. Like somebody else said, Comcast owns NBC. If there was any truth to that it would be Comcast buying it, not NBC. But if you google any combination of Sirius, NBC and Comcast there's not a single story saying that it's a possibility.

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  2. Apparently the word is that NBC is buying Sirius, who knows if thats a good or bad thing. But hell I imagine any kind of change of management would be good.

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  3. If NBC is buying, by extension Comcast is buying....and nobody quite knows how to bungle things like Comcast/NBC. But that said, I agree that any management change would probably be better than the current regime.

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  4. I doubt an organization like that would have any interest in dealing with Ope's sniping or Ant's borderline racism. In their minds they already have one "shock jock" show, and grandpa Stern has been sanitized by being a national star. Why put up with another, especially a show that terminates in October and is making demands that cost money to no end. The show is a tar baby to corporate media, they'll be glad to see it go.

    The path forward has been blazed by Kevin Smith, if the boys are paying attention. You don't charge for the podcast, but you do sell tickets to attend the show. It could stay in NYC for the most part, but like Kevin, go on the road, employing various comedians just like they do now, maybe piggybacking a stand up appearance with a following show taping on the same ticket. That way they can tap into their national audience, even in cities that never were associated with syndication. Two thousand in Seattle, Kansas City or Tampa to be in on the show? Easy. Granted, Cleveland was always a hot spot, but look at the audience that squeezed into a little strip club on a few days notice, chanting "ONA, ONA" just like the old days.

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    1. I disagree a bit. Opie and Anthony has the leg up on all these other people trying to podcast because they already have a built in audience who pays 15 dollars a month to listen to their show. They could easily start an Opie and Anthony podcast and do the exact same 3 hour radio show they're doing right now and they'd have NO problem finding people who would pay 5 dollars a month to hear it. Sure, not everybody would do it, some of us would be right here. But even if they only got 10,000 people to subscribe that would be 50,000 bucks a month on top of what they get for advertising. It'd be a paycut I'm sure, but they'd be doing the show from home, with no bosses, with complete freedom and still making a damn good living on top of the FU money they already have. It's a no brainer to me and I don't get why they've said there's no money in podcasting for so long. Sure, there's no money in it for Marc Maron or whoever, but O&A's listeners have already proven they're willing to pay for their show.

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