Before two games in 1986 I hung out with the salty-tongued LA Dodgers manager in his office under Dodger Stadium. This is the X-rated version of my quality time with one of the nicest celebrities I ever met. “I get these fucking invitations to weddings,” Tommy Lasorda was saying, his bare feet propped on his…
Read More ...Radio Rant: Our Top Journalists Failed to Question Wild-Ass Covid-19 Predictions
At the 60-minute mark of this podcast from Dan Proft, a smart radio talk-show guy in Chicago at AM 560 the Answer, I’m interviewed about the failure of our media to question the sky-high projections of U.S. Covid-19 deaths by disease modeler Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London. Bill’s interview with Dan Proft…
Read More ...The New York Post vs. the New York Times
I’ve always used the wild and crazy and fun and reader-pleasing journalism of the New York Post and the smug, serious, boring, good-for-you journalism of the NY Times as the two ends of the newspaper spectrum. In the interest of maximum reader satisfaction, during my 30-plus career in newspapers — you remember them, don’t you…
Read More ...Dead Mag Walking — Time’s Hit Piece on Sweden’s Other Way of Fighting the Coronavirus
Maybe part of the reason Time magazine has become so irrelevant is that its journalism stinks. For decades Time and its weekly cousins Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were the go-to-places to read continuing in-depth coverage of presidential races and world-shaking events like 9/11 and our serial wars in the Middle East. The…
Read More ...For future reference: Never believe the wild-assed guesses of the disease modelers
It’s way too late now, but here’s a concept to keep in mind for the future, if there is one, when the next virus comes along: Never believe the wild-ass scary numbers that an expert modeler of diseases from the USA or the UK or the WHO projects, predicts or guesses. it ought…
Read More ...Bill's Q&A's
Q&A: Tucker Carlson, before he became King of Cable — and GOP presidential timber
Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book "30 Days a Black Man" tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's nationally syndicated series "In the Land of Jim Crow" exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America's legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said "30 Days a Black Man" is "a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure..." that Steigerwald turned "into rollicking, haunting American history." ... READ MORE