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What's up with Lieberman?

When I was in journalism school at San Jose State, I had to put together a weekly report of 10 typos I found across publications. Once I discovered his blog, there was no need for “publications” to be plural. I successfully completed the assignment every week thanks to Rich’s blog posts, which provided all the content I needed. I hope that, wherever he is, he is still typo-ing it up.
 
Ryan_K said:
When I was in journalism school at San Jose State, I had to put together a weekly report of 10 typos I found across publications. Once I discovered his blog, there was no need for “publications” to be plural. I successfully completed the assignment every week thanks to Rich’s blog posts, which provided all the content I needed. I hope that, wherever he is, he is still typo-ing it up.
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Prepare to be screamed at in his next video!
 
radiofan2023 said:
Prepare to be screamed at in his next video!
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I wrote privately to Lieberman maybe a half dozen times about the factual errors, the misspellings, typos, poor grammar, insults, etc., and how unprofessional they all made him look. (As I've written here [on RD] before, we all make typos, so I don't sweat the garden variety ones, but at a certain point...) That if he wanted to be taken seriously as a journalist blogger, he needed to clean up his act. He responded to the first one, denying or poo-pooing the points I made, then ignored my subsequent messages. At a certain point I stopped writing except to correct some significant factual error, but he ignored those too and refused to correct anything, and after a few of those I just wrote the guy off as unserious and insincere.

Whatever his motivations for writing the blog, and later turning it into a vlog, being an actual journalist was not among them.
 
Weiserguy said:
Whatever his motivations for writing the blog, and later turning it into a vlog, being an actual journalist was not among them.
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There's a lot that mystifies me about what he was doing. The funny thing was, when he played it straight...which he did maybe five per cent of the time...he was actually OK. If we had seen a lot more of that, I think he would have been more successful, at least by conventional measures of success. But he seemed to act as if he were the equivalent of a radio talk-show host, getting his followers all worked up in his own pursuit for attention. That pursuit seemed desperate. He often alluded to his difficult financial position...so maybe he thought he had to resort to attention-getting tactics in order to survive. There certainly was and is much to criticize in Bay Area media. But there are times when it's more effective just to let the facts speak for themselves. Lieberman seemed to bounce between extremes in the tone of his writing, with the prevailing tone being histrionic.

I wonder if he realized that the sexism (demonstrated by his tendency to judge women meteorologists on non-meteorological measurements) and homophobia (the way he attacked Reggie Aqui for his on-air mannerisms was dreadful) often present in his writing were also nonstarters. Those were things he shouldn't have dragged into his reporting and commentary.

The quality of reporting on Bay Area media generally has not been good. There was a columnist named Bill Mann. He had been at the Oakland Tribune before the Bay Area News Group (BANG) took it over in the 1990s and ran it into the ground. I've seen his columns from better days at the Tribune and they were pretty reasonable, with a somewhat breezy, chatty approach. He later wrote for the Contra Costa Times, or at least the neighborhood newspapers associated with it, including the Montclarion in Oakland. That's where I saw his most recent work. The tone was far different from what he wrote at the Trib: it was nasty and bitter. At some point, maybe 10-15 years ago or more, the column was dropped, possibly when BANG took over the Times.

None of this is to say that Lieberman should have turned his blog over to rewrites of news releases. I think it should have been possible for him to maintain a critical, analytic stance while avoiding personal attacks. There's a difference between being critical and being just flat-out mean.
 
His repetitive fixation on Van Amburg, KFRC, Belva Davis, and other stuff got tiresome too. It seemed like the only current station he liked was KSCO.
 
radiofan2023 said:
His return video is more boring than a McDonald’s parking lot in Cotati!
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I had to stop after 20 minutes. It was like watching someone have a nervous breakdown.

Surprised that I never encountered him in Oakland.
 
Mark Roberts said:
I once saw "KCBS Insider" Phil Matier at Italian Colors in Montclair Village.
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That's fun.

He actually hasn't retired yet. I sometimes wonder if he ever will (Narcee (sp?) David didn't retire as I recall, and continued to do his daily food segment at KCBS until a couple months before he died, if that).

Speaking of retirements, I had to get to South SF early one morning for a Dr's appointment, and as is our normal custom, we listened to KCBS on the drive down.

Eric Thomas was doing mornings then, and it happened that that day (September 29, 2025) was his last day on the air before retiring.

I hope he's enjoying himself. He earned it!

c
 


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