OK, boys and girls, we'll take it one simple fact at a time.
1. McPhee was not a radio talent in the traditional sense. That won't kill a radio career, ironically enough. Apparently nobody made an effort to get her to modulate her voice. But the other problem was her knee-jerk fawning over cops. It reached its nadir when she went on hysterically about efforts to scale back the huge benefits cops get from the Quinn Bill (which provides big pay benefits for "bachelor's" and "master's" degrees that are basically of the peel-and-stick variety with most of them granted by just two "colleges.) It also got pretty bad when she defended the practice of using cops at every road detail everywhere. Clearly she wanted to remain in good stead with the cops for her "other work," such as books, in which being a sycophant for cops plays dividends in the form of insider information (q.v. Barnicle, Mike).
2. If you bring something to the table in terms of world expertise, you have to use that expertise when you're doing talk, you can't use talk to try to further your expertise elsewhere or else the very reason you were hired becomes irrelevant
3. McPhee was more interested in protecting the people who made her a good cops reporter than in discussing issues. The two are incompatible. Combined with a speaking voice that nobody did a damn thing to help her use properly in radio, an issues-oriented talk program that protects a vested interest is painfully shallow and holds little interest.
4. Contrast her with Finneran. Yes, Finneran. He has improved dramatically as a talk host because he has moved away from the inside baseball discussions and the calls from nitwit reps who refer to him as Mr. Speaker. He's a lawyer. IN the beginning, he was doing the lawyer-state rep thing, talking the way one might talk to an appeals court, a law school seminar or a committee chairman. Now he's approaching the program like a trial, rather than like an appellate court to be convinced of some arcane point or law or a group of students to be lectured. He's performing as if he's in a trial with the audience as jurors -- average people that he needs to keep interested and engaged in the conversation, but with a big difference. On the radio he may be trying to convince his audience of a point of view, but he doesn't have to, he only needs to keep them engaged.
Compared to when he started, he's doing that, and he's treading increasingly less lightly on people and institutions that he used to treat with some institutional deference.
5. Nobody who gets blown out does a last show. Nobody who goes public with getting gassed does a last show.
6. Forget about ESPN. I torched the babble about Entercom taking WEEI to an ESPN format two years ago and I was right, as I invariably am. Syndicated sports won't trump two local sports stations. Won't happen so forget bout it.
