I was in my office this morning working on a project and before watching our church live stream I turned on some of the Sunday morning political pundits to see what they were talking about.  I heard one of the hosts say that The Huffington Post was celebrating it’s 5th year online this weekend.  They also went on to say that The Huffington Post was neck in neck w/ The New York Times in terms of traffic to their website.  This got me to thinking.  Arianna started 5 years ago, and The New York Times was founded when?  Oh, 1851… hmm…

I am not a follower of The Huffington Post, I’m not a big fan of news outlets that lean too far in either direction when it comes to their political reporting.  I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, just tell me what’s going on and I will form my own opinion. It’s for that very reason that I don’t watch Fox News. I don’t need Glen Beck to give me reasons as to why I should be mad about things, because honestly I figure myself to be a little sharper than his average viewer.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, that’s just how it is. 

Now, I do think Glen Beck has it going on, as long as people are buying into his show, he is going to continue to make a bundle from it.  Isn’t that what it’s all about at the end of the day?  You pay me what they pay him and I will go on television and convince people they can fly. haha.  But, by getting on the level that Fox does w/ a lot of their programming, haven’t they left themselves wide open to have their market share consumed by other angry and opinionated bloggers like Arianna?  It’s not just Fox either, it’s almost all of the news agencies today, print, television, radio, etc.  Back in the day it didn’t used to be that way… 

I bet the average person never really knew Walter Cronkite’s personal political leanings, he just did his job and reported the news. That’s why he was the most trusted man in America at one time, he didn’t try to put a spin on it, didn’t have to, he’d never heard of a blogger.  It was what it was w/ Cronkite.  We landed on the moon.  Kennedy is dead.  The Nation Mourns.  Of course later in life, when he wasn’t behind the CBS news desk he did do some freelance work for outlets like The Huffington Post and a few others, but he used this outlet to express his views and not from behind the news desk! 

Now, fast forward 40 years…  News outlets complain about losses in revenue, market share, etc., but by injecting their agendas into their product (the news) haven’t they left themselves wide open for this the entire time.  I have to think they sort of did.  I think it’s great that anyone w/ an opinion can fire up a blog and become a media rock star overnight.  Sort of evens out the playing field a little bit. Now, again for the record, I don’t follow Arianna Huffington, nor do I agree w/ many of her ideas, but kudos to her as a blogger for what she has been able to do.

The bottom line I guess, if I was trapped in a corn maze w/ Arianna Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, and I had to work with one of them to find my way out of the maze, Rupert is SOL…

One of my absolute favorite radio personalities of all time passed away this weekend and I wanted to take a moment to make mention of it.  I was on my good friend, Bob Connell’s blog this morning and noticed he had posted some articles about Paul on his website. 

I have always had a lot of respect for Paul Harvey throughout the years, he always produced a top-notch radio program that to this day has not been successfully duplicated by anyone else in the industry.  He never lost touch w/ his strong Christian values and managed to have one of the longest runs in radio.  He always tried products before he endorsed them, and believe it or not he always researched out his stories on his own and wrote all of his content throughout the years.  It’s not going to be the same without Paul Harvey on the radio…

The headlines may have gone to more flamboyant radio personalities, the Howard Sterns and Rush Limbaughs of the world. But in raw popularity, Chicago’s Paul Harvey topped them all.

He was the most-listened-to broadcaster in America, whose shows originating from studios at Michigan and Wacker in Chicago were heard by 25 million people every day at the peak of his career.

Radio legend Paul Harvey died Saturday at the age of 90. Harvey was the most listened-to broadcaster in America and his shows were heard by 18 million people every day.

Mr. Harvey, 90, died Saturday at a hospital in Phoenix, where he had a winter home, less than a year after his wife, Lynne “Angel” Harvey, had passed away.

“He was devastated by her loss. It took him a great deal of time to get back on the air,” said Mr. Harvey’s close friend, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Bruce DuMont.

When Mr. Harvey returned, he shared his grief with his listeners.

“He was never the same Paul Harvey,” said DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. “She was the spark, he was the talent. That relationship is now gone forever. It’s tragic.”

“My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news,” said the couple’s only child, Paul Harvey Jr., who like his parents is in the Radio Hall of Fame. “So in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents, and today millions have lost a friend.”

Heard locally on KFFB 106.1 FM, Mr. Harvey would commute from his River Forest home to his Chicago office, arriving by 4:30 every morning. He wrote his news shows and his staunchly conservative commentary, “Paul Harvey News.”

Paul Harvey Jr. wrote “The Rest of the Story” — a program his father would broadcast.

“Hello, Americans,” Mr. Harvey would say when delivering the show his son wrote. “You know what the news is. In a minute, you’re going to hear the rest of the story.”

In 2000, at age 82, Mr. Harvey signed a 10-year pact worth a reported $100 million, “the biggest deal ever cut with a radio personality,” according to the president of ABC Radio.

Born in Oklahoma in 1918, Mr. Harvey was based in Chicago since the end of World War II. A stretch of Wacker Drive has been given the honorary name “Paul Harvey Drive,” as his studios are nearby.

His programs were carried by 1,200 radio stations, plus an additional 400 stations of American Forces Radio. His syndicated newspaper column was at one time carried in 300 newspapers.

With an audience like that, words that Harvey coined — such as “Reaganomics” and “guesstimate” — have entered into American English. His TV program, “Paul Harvey Comments,” ran from 1968 to 1988 and was syndicated to 100 stations.

Mr. Harvey was never reluctant to go out on a limb. He sent out his “Eisenhower Wins” column two weeks ahead of the election.

Not that he was always right: He predicted that Elvis Presley wouldn’t last a year.

That was a typical call for Mr. Harvey, who made a career of praising Midwestern virtues at the expense of pop culture and the coasts, particularly New York. Appearing before a congressional subcommittee on offensive radio and TV broadcasts in 1952, Mr. Harvey condemned comedians “steeped in the nightlife of bawdy Manhattan” and claimed that their “girdle gags” had forced him “to turn off the radio to keep from blushing in front of my wife.”

He once described his listeners as a “vast, decent, middle-income, middle-IQ audience,” and Mr. Harvey’s politics reflected the right-wing slant of mainstream America.

When Sen. Joseph McCarthy came to Chicago in 1954, he was a guest at Mr. Harvey’s home.

He was born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa, Okla., the descendent of five generations of Baptist ministers. He got his first job at age 15 on KVOO in Tulsa.

Mr. Harvey attended Tulsa University while continuing to work at KVOO. After graduating, he moved through a variety of stations, ending up at KXOK in St. Louis, where he met his future wife, Lynne Cooper, in 1939. Mr. Harvey proposed to her the day they met, and they married several months later.

Mr. Harvey went to Hawaii to broadcast for the Navy in 1940. He was on a ship, two days out of Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Back in the States, Mr. Harvey was named director of news and information for the Office of War Information for Michigan and Indiana.

He enlisted in the Air Force and moved to Chicago after receiving a medical discharge in 1944, joining Chicago’s WENR-ABC newsroom.

After President Franklin Roosevelt died, he delivered a famous obituary beginning, “A great tree has fallen. . . .”

In 1955, Mr. Harvey began a syndicated newspaper column, “Paul Harvey News.” He also wrote three popular books in the 1950s: Remember These Things (1952), Autumn of Liberty (1954) and The Rest of the Story (1956).

While generally the voice of Middle America, something of a Reader’s Digest of the air, Mr. Harvey was not unwaveringly so. He voiced opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as early as 1966.

During his career, Mr. Harvey withstood pressure to dump radio for TV and move to New York or Washington, D.C., DuMont said.

“He wanted to be in Chicago to maintain his connection to Midwestern values,” DuMont said. “He never did a broadcast without a tie and white shirt.”

“The fact that he remained rooted in the Midwest gave him a unique sensibility. But his appeal crossed lines from rural to urban to suburban,” said former Chicago Sun-Times TV and radio columnist Robert Feder.

“The other thing is, he was personally a man of incredible graciousness who never failed to acknowledge a kind word from peers, young journalists and others.”

And, of course, there was that trademark radio voice.

“You’d better be right,” comedian Danny Thomas once told Mr. Harvey, “because you sound like God.”