Severin was just suspended again by 96.9, and to digress for a moment, some are puzzled about the station’s true motivation. Sure, he called the women making sexual harassment allegations against American Apparel chairman Dov Charney “whores.’’ And yes, he claimed that when he had his own business, “I slept with virtually every young college girl I hired to be an intern or an employee for my firm.’’
But that kind of discourse is just par for the course for Jay. Which makes close observers suspect WTKK is casting about for an excuse to unload a highly paid host whose act has grown tired. “They loved his shtick when his ratings were good, but they hate it now that his numbers are tanking,’’ noted one station employee.
Yet it was an entirely different Severin assertion that left me shaking my head in does-he-really-think-his-listeners-are-that-easily-duped disbelief last week. During one of his periodic anti-Globe tirades, Severin offered this statement: “A Boston Globe columnist has claimed repeatedly over the years that I claimed I won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a total lie. I never ever said it. But it was written several times in the Boston Globe. I was quoted in the Boston Globe as having said something I never said.’’
That columnist would be me. Now, a listener unfamiliar with Jay’s tenuous relationship with the truth might be inclined to think that he wouldn’t offer such a stout denial in the face of the facts. So here, again, is what Severin said on his show back on September 9, 2005: “But since journalism began, and up until the time at least that I took my master’s degree at Boston University and may I add without being obnoxious, up till and including the time that I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in on-line journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism, the highest possible award for writing on the Web, right up to and including that in 1998, you still had to practice journalism to be a journalist.’’
