When will Snyder pull the plug on Czaben?

[RFKFedEx]

Czabe and Andy are LOCAL guys in a sports media market that has almost no homegrown talent.

Nearly all of DC's sports media figures were imported from somewhere else. Few of them grew up here, rooting for our teams.

George Michael: Philly.

Tony Kornheiser: NY

Wilbon: Chicago

Czaban has always been a Redskins fan who has experienced the same highs and lows as the rest of us.

I can't imagine anyone with a better resumee for local talk radio.

Snyder would be foolish to replace The Sports Reporters.

Larry Michael can be the homer of 980 while Czabe and Andy are the realists.

[ntotoro]

Most of the people seem to like him and we all have one thing in common which is the most important thing...we listen to him.

We who... ?

[ntotoro]

Larry Michael can be the homer of 980 while Czabe and Andy are the professional contrarians.

Fixed that for you.

[RFKFedEx]

Fixed that for you.

Perhaps the ying and the yang of 980 would be a more centered comparison of Larry and The Reporters.

[HateYanksDukeCowboys]

Doc is on from 12-2

going to their site as i write this..........Doc is the best they have.

[Walking Deadman]

Czaban is like most Skins fans?

I shudder at that thought.

[DCsportsfan53]

Because (hopefully it's true), as Snyder has stated, he didn't buy the radio station to control the message and he doesn't intend to edit the content or fire people who say negative things about the team. Yeah, Czaban's a little bit of a drama queen/windbag but he's often entertaining and has a lot of supporters. Additionally, it's still a business venture and Czabe's shows delivers in terms of ratings. I'm not exactly a fan of his but hell, at least it's local content on my drive home and not another ESPN ****face.

[cphil006]

Czabe will say anything for ratings and I don't really think he believes what he says.

He stirs the pot trying to get listenership (new word?)

[E-Dog Night]

Czaban knows his stuff and I usually enjoy his delivery. If Snyder were to be directly involved in his firing, it would confirm the notion that Snyder is trying to play dictator and control the content of as many media outlets that report on his team as he can.

I think that would be a very stupid move on his part. Public opinion of Snyder is just starting to come around, and firing Czaban would justifiably open up another avenue of disgust toward our little despot.

[askounes]

I actually think Czaban is the most interesting personalities on WTEM. I'm glad the Sports Reporters are on during PM drive time... listen to them almost every day coming home from work.

It's the REST of the WTEM lineup that is near unlistenable, IMO. Doc Walker is a good football analyst, but his show is horrid. John Thompson and his sausage sandwiches shouldn't be a radio host, and wouldn't be if he didn't carry so much street cred with other atheletes. I prefer Czaban's "First Team" morning show by far over "Mike and Mike", and Colin Cowherd is only slightly less annoying than Jim Rome.

So, for my money, if Andy and Steve wanted to just do 24/7 Sports Reporters on WTEM, it would be a marked improvement.

[hail2skins]

I like Czabe but I do think Steve and Andy would serve themselves better if they paid more than lip service to the other teams in the area. Sure, the fall is expected to be Skins-heavy but during the other times of the year they all but ignore the Wiz, Caps, and Nats. They do discuss Maryland hoops but probably only because Chris Knoche is a frequent guest. I do blame Pollin for a lot of this........he knows his Skins but doesn't seem to care much about other sports. The show also should be driven more by the callers.

[@DCGoldPants]

Snyder is a business man first. He sees the ratings.

Why is Larry off the radio at noon? Why will he be out as play by play next season?

Czab will still be there.

Mr. Snyder realizes that he has a guy with National Radio chops on his afternoon drive time show. That simple.

[Horatio]

Here's the latest City Paper article on Snyderatto's plans for radio. If they succeed in driving all media that is critical of the Redskins off the air, then what you have left is basically propaganda...which Larry Michael already provides:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/cheapseats/

Radio Violence

Redskins keep using new media to go after old media.

By Dave McKenna

Posted: October 1, 2008

Last week, in just his second outing as a sports radio host, Vinny Cerrato accused the Washington Post’s Jason La Canfora of tattling to NFL officials about possible tampering violations. The Redskins’ executive vice president for football operations said La Canfora was hoping to get the league to hand down sanctions and “hurt” the team.

Also last week, the team’s senior vice president and executive producer of media, Larry Michael, went on his new cable show—Redskins Nation—to repeat Cerrato’s snitching accusations and to rail that La Canfora has a “hateful spirit” toward the team.

On Redskins Nation, Michael had already created a humorless recurring feature to slam La Canfora’s work habits called “The Sourcerer.” Now he was wondering aloud and without irony if the team should ban the reporter from Redskins Park lest he “leak information from this building to the opposition.” Michael, who is also the team’s play-by-play announcer, told fans they, too, should be scared by La Canfora’s spying.

Anybody wondering why Cerrato—the highest-ranking Redskins official not named Dan Snyder—would want a radio show, or why Michael would add a TV hosting gig to his responsibilities, got those answers with the two-pronged attack against La Canfora?

Even as the Skins were becoming the feel-good story of the entire league, Cerrato and Michael, a pair of bigwigs in the Redskins front office, were using the team’s surge, along with Snyder’s newest radio station and TV show, to try to settle scores with a writer.

La Canfora and his boss, sports editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, declined to comment on the feud, though Garcia-Ruiz posted a memo on washingtonpost.com saying basically the Redskins were confusing reporting with snitching—La Canfora had merely asked the NFL whether there might be a conflict between Cerrato’s on-air pontificating and his behind-the-scenes personnel responsibilities.

Was Cerrato and Michael’s multimedia anti-media blitz, given the timing, bizarre and petty?

Sure and surer, respectively.

Was it surprising? Nah—this is what the Redskins do.

Under Snyder, the whole point of buying into different media is to find new ways to attack the infidels. La Canfora is only the latest to get called out by team management.

“When the Skins get upset with the coverage, from my experience, they can try to go after you,” says Nunyo Demasio, a former Post beat reporter.

Demasio knows: Cerrato and the Skins officials went after him in nearly identical fashion a couple of years ago.

You can look it up.

A few years back, Snyder installed “Redskins Unfiltered,” a news service in the Pravda mold run by the team out of its Web site.

Cerrato utilized Unfiltered during its early days to blast Demasio. The biggest blast came after Demasio had repeated what turned out to be a false rumor that defensive back Ryan Clark had been cut. Cerrato, with help from other top Redskins officials, used the error to make a larger attack on him and the paper.

“This guessing game to decide who will be cut has consequences, especially when [the Post] goes with information from uninformed sources,” Cerrato was quoted in an Unfiltered article, which the New York Times later reported was written by Karl Swanson, the team’s executive vice president for communications.

And in 2005, Snyder became the first NFL owner to buy a fan message board when he took over Extremeskins.com, the biggest board in the burgundy-and-gold universe.

At the time, the team was peeved at the Post’s coverage of such things as the “obstructed view” seating Snyder had installed at FedExField.

The Redskins had pulled a block of season tickets from the Post around the time that one of the obstructed-view-seats stories ran, so Snyder was getting hammered for what looked like an attempt to use his team’s tickets to manage local reporting.

Snyder, whose interview history is spare enough to make Sarah Palin seem like an open book, served as the guest in the first “chat” posted on Extremeskins after he took it over. The day before the chat appeared on his Web site, the Post ran a story on Snyder having cut down trees on protected lands along the banks of the Potomac River.

He used his new bully pulpit to go after the newspaper. Snyder blasted “corporations that had amassed tickets” only to get involved in “mass scalping rings.”

“I would encourage the local media to follow the example of the national outlets like USA Today which refuses to use unidentified sources. Most obviously have personal agendas,” Snyder also posted. “It’s a shame that with newspapers in a mass circulation decline the public has to pay the price of unethical behavior as the papers try to attract readers to stop the slide in readership and circulation.”

Swanson also had a chat on the site that went after Demasio for using “650 unidentified sources” in his Redskins stories. He directed chatters to a thread called “The Nunyo Files,” which was a clearinghouse for attacks on Demasio from Extremeskins members.

No slight is too insignificant.

In January 2006, the Post ran a series called “Waiting to XL: The lighter side of the Redskins’ quest for a fourth Super Bowl title,” a small collection of tales written by Eli Saslow leading up to a Skins playoff game with the Seattle Seahawks.

Among the observations in Saslow’s offering was a report that the team lunch featured burritos from Baja Fresh, a “fast-food burrito joint popular among broke college kids” whose average dish “weighed in at 1,100 calories.”

The Skins had just ramped up use of video reports as part of Redskins Unfiltered. Michael, the team’s broadcaster, took a crew with him to the team’s dining room and filmed a long and totally humorless piece in which one Redskins employee after another insisted that players only were fed healthy stuff and that Baja Fresh was not “fast food.”

So, as the Redskins were about to make their first playoff appearance since the return of Joe Gibbs, Michael was consumed with making mountains out of media molehills.Yet for all its use as an anti-media medium, the most newsworthy chapter in the history of the Unfiltered news service to this date came when Michael posted video of contact drills at early-summer “organized team activity” workouts in 2005.

Turns out such drills violated the league’s collective bargaining agreement.

An NFL Players Association official saw Michael’s video and reported what was going on to the league. The NFL punished the team, without any call from La Canfora or any other Post reporter, by revoking the Redskins’ right to hold any more voluntary workouts during the 2005 offseason. The Skins yanked the video off the team Web site as the penalty was announced.

[Horatio]

Snyder is a business man first. He sees the ratings.

Why is Larry off the radio at noon? Why will he be out as play by play next season?

Czab will still be there.

If that's true, then why did Snyder axe Czaban's highly-rated morning show in favor of the mind-numbing Mike & Mike? Czaban got far better ratings than those clowns, yet his show was dumped.

Snyder wants only pro-Redskin media, a la Larry Michael, on the air, and doesn't want any criticism of how he and Vinny run the team.

[ouvan59]

If that's true, then why did Snyder axe Czaban's highly-rated morning show in favor of the mind-numbing Mike & Mike? Czaban got far better ratings than those clowns, yet his show was dumped.

Snyder wants only pro-Redskin media, a la Larry Michael, on the air, and doesn't want any criticism of how he and Vinny run the team.

Because he became an ESPN affiliate and Czaban's show is Fox.

[RFKFedEx]

Because he became an ESPN affiliate and Czaban's show is Fox.

I'll bet if Snyder had demanded that ESPN 980 carry Czaban's morning show from Fox, a deal could have been reached. $ talks and BS walks.

I agree that Czaban's morning show is much better than M&M. However, M&M probably gets better ratings b/c they're on more stations around the country and ESPN is so much bigger than Fox. People know who M&M are b/c they are so heavily propmoted. Familiarity is importatnt to the casual listener. It was probably a better business decision to go w/M&M.

[Forehead]

I call BS. The "there's no cryin' in baseball" rule would have prevented Czaban from coaching little league.

How much do you want to lose:cool: I'm at every ES tailgate, I still have the little league program from that year. It's in pretty good shape for something that's 16-17 years old, but it clearly states "Steve Czaban" as coach.

[cphil006]

Snyder is a business man first. He sees the ratings.

Why is Larry off the radio at noon? Why will he be out as play by play next season?

Czab will still be there.

Mr. Snyder realizes that he has a guy with National Radio chops on his afternoon drive time show. That simple.

Snyder is a Redskins fan first. That is why he overpays players. He wants to win so bad. He has changed his ways and is putting the right people in place to improve the org.

[Walking Deadman]

Snyder wants only pro-Redskin media, a la Larry Michael, on the air, and doesn't want any criticism of how he and Vinny run the team.

Ok.

If that's true then why are the Sports Reporters still at 980?

Why is Brian Mitchell still there?

Al Koken?

Why does Dave Mckenna always write Skins-bashing articles?

Controversy and negative media sells........

What was the 980 story a few weeks ago that made national headlines and internet blogdom?

Brian Mitchell vs. Clinton Portis.

Now Lacanfora and Mckenna probably won't admit that. They'll probably tell you that they are just "reporting the facts" . But the fact is that they are just coming up with ways to sell papers and internet hits to generate ad revenue.

Propaganda is propaganda. The Redskins have their with Redskins.com, Redskins Nation and other venues. The City Paper and others have theirs in order generate revenue.

[Horatio]

Because he became an ESPN affiliate and Czaban's show is Fox.

Look, even the Weekly Standard said that's a BS argument:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/447rdxhx.asp

"But for Snyder, there's a hidden bonus: His new monopoly will allow him to discourage the local talkers from criticizing him and his team.

WTEM's star personality is a fellow named Steve Czaban, who hosted both the morning drive program (which was itself syndicated to other stations) and a local-only afternoon drive show. The Washington sports establishment is notoriously sycophantic toward the Redskins, in part a hangover from the Jack Kent Cooke/Joe Gibbs glory days of the 1980s and early '90s. But Czaban was one of the few guys with the sand to criticize Snyder and the Skins."

"So Snyder's next big move was to axe Czaban's morning show. The decision made no business sense. Czaban's show was doing double the ratings among the key advertising demographic (men aged 25 to 54) as the ESPN show that replaced it (which Snyder had been running on his original network). But it did make a certain kind of sense when coupled with another change: Shortly after taking control of the station, Snyder had Czaban's afternoon show do a stint broadcasting from the mothership of Redskins Park, with a parade of Skins personnel as special guests. The resulting state-sponsored pageant played out like a scene from Animal Farm. And the message was clear: Criticize Snyder and the Skins at your own risk; management is watching."

[SKINS_RJ_44]

I actually think Czaban is the most interesting personalities on WTEM. I'm glad the Sports Reporters are on during PM drive time... listen to them almost every day coming home from work.

It's the REST of the WTEM lineup that is near unlistenable, IMO. Doc Walker is a good football analyst, but his show is horrid. John Thompson and his sausage sandwiches shouldn't be a radio host, and wouldn't be if he didn't carry so much street cred with other atheletes. I prefer Czaban's "First Team" morning show by far over "Mike and Mike", and Colin Cowherd is only slightly less annoying than Jim Rome.

So, for my money, if Andy and Steve wanted to just do 24/7 Sports Reporters on WTEM, it would be a marked improvement.

I have to agree, the best show on ESPN 980 is the Sports Reporters. The other shows I rarely listen to.

[stroupjr]

Yeah, Doc's show is the best.