Damn! Just when I thought his podcast Bully Pulpit was picking up traction, Bob decided to throw in the towel because there weren’t enough paid subscribers and it’s hard to do something for free successfully in a universe with thousands of competitors; when I set out to do Gifts of the Maggi, I already conceded Marc Maron is the king. I’m guilty on being stingy too. Given this economy and all the house renovations, money is tight. We can also thank Fed Chairman Jerome Powell for jacking rates 3/4 of a point. Should I get the usual paltry cost-of-living increase, the One Percenters ruling Amerika already spent it for me.
Anyway, Bob is nearing retirement as well. He will continue to write columns and those will appear in my e-mail box, huzzah! It just won’t be the same though. On Bully Pulpit, he didn’t pull punches, he called a lie a lie and said what many of us were thinking, may the NRA and their Republican/NeoLiberal stooges burn in Hell. The biggest surprise was him revealing what went down at WNYC and On the Media over the last few years, especially after Girth Vader was elected. I remember the special episode involving him arguing with executive producer Katya Rogers and Brooke Gladstone the day after HRC’s brutal defeat. It seems his warning “…may we not all be on a ship of fools” sealed his fate with those two assholes and the thin-skinned Millenial staffers; how dare Bob get angry at a producer for doing the opposite of what they were instructed to do, thinking they could get away with it at the last minute or continuing to push a shit story they’ve been told “no” about five times. I do hope Bob gets a big-ass settlement from WNYC which involves the firing of Rogers and Gladstone since OTM lost sight of its original mission some years ago. The show was supposed to be about all the different forms of Media involving the economics (papers collapsing left and right today), the new tech (how FeceBook steals its content), the controversies, its History, so on. Instead, too often, over half an episode would be hijacked for three weeks via a crap piece about homeless goat-fucking Tibetan basket weavers since All Things Considered had the nerve not to appease the same Millenial producer and their pet project.
Thanks for everything Bob! I’m going to miss you and your swan song show was awesome. Keep fighting the good fight to the end.