about the agony of the fans, the losing tradition, the despair of the downtown business community or the team’s refusal to spend any of the $110 million they’re making this year via the MASN deal.
It’s almost comical. They don’t report on the suppression of free speech while they refuse to ask any questions or force any accountability from a billionaire baseball team ownership group that has turned downtown Baltimore into a spring and summer ghost town on summer nights while raping the city of three generations of civic pride and heritage for baseball and pocketing tens of millions of dollars of our cable TV money.
And of course, banning free speech and never taking a question from anyone in the public is standard operating procedure for the baseball team.
So let’s do the dirty, little, “hush money” tree from the top down, shall we? (Pay attention, we might have a quiz at the end of this…or you might just simply have a headache.)
Peter Angelos is a tyrant, a megalomaniac and an opponent of free speech – at this point that supposition should be inarguable by any sensible person.
He owns the Orioles and MASN, where he prints money off the public’s back via their cable TV bill. Angelos has “partnered” with CBS Radio, who pays HIM money and then is a eunuch in every facet of their sports talk product in regard to the worst franchise in the sport. CBS also happens to own WJZ-TV Channel 13, where the Orioles not only put games on during some summer nights, but also use them to co-market “The Fan” and MASN, via a daily simulcast partnership.
Jay Newman, who runs CBS’ WJZ-TV also has a “content sharing” partnership with the bankrupt, dying newspaper down on Calvert Street called The Baltimore Sun. And last, but not least, there’s Pressbox, the woefully out-of-touch monthly sports publication that takes Angelos’ money for print ads (and you KNOW what that means) and is weekend broadcast partners with Bob Phillips and CBS Radio, not to mention WMAR-TV Channel 2.
It’s like one giant old white guy’s media orgy under the cones of silence where Angelos is the fat guy in the middle getting fed grapes by all of his indentured servants and throwing the peasants and the executives money to “tell it the way it really is, but keep your opinions to yourself.”
Read that quote again and go back and listen to it in Angelos’ voice one more time. That’s the EXACT quote…
I guess civic accountability isn’t as significant as that orange ad for fireworks night or The Sun logo over the clock in centerfield at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Who knows? Angelos would be happy if he didn’t lease the boys on Calvert Street a skybox. Word is the fellas in purple across the street are still chasing their pre-bankruptcy skybox money from an advertising deal with the Tribune boys.
So who is the real loser in this continued suppression of ideology and free speech when the teams that are publicly financed, supported and beloved are threatening the media’s ability to have “free speech” via partnership deals?
That would be the citizens of Baltimore.
What do you really want me to do? Endorse 13 years of mean-spirited behavior and ineptitude all while the team continues to lose and print money at a mind-blowing level? Money that’s being siphoned quietly off of your cable TV bill?
Is that what a real “fan” of the team or the community should do? Is that a responsible act on my part to “play the game?” Should I “tell it like it is but keep
