I’m somewhat surprised that Kevin Kietzman got the ax at radio station WHB, but not overly so.
The gaffe he made on his “Between the Lines” show early this week was pretty damned serious.
He strayed far across the dividing line between sports and personal criticism when he said this about Kansas City Chiefs’ coach Andy Reid’s ability to manage players’ off-field problems…
“Andy Reid does not have a great record of fixing players. He doesn’t. Discipline is not his thing. It did not work out particularly well in his family life and that needs to be added to this as we’re talking about the Chiefs. He wasn’t real great at that either. He’s had a lot of things go bad on him: family and players. He is not good at fixing people.”
The clear “family” reference was to at least one of Reid’s sons, Garrett, who died in 2012 at age 29 of a heroin overdose.
Another of Reid’s sons, Britt, who is on the Chiefs’ staff, pleaded guilty to weapons and prescription drug charges after being involved in a road rage incident near Philadelphia in 2007.
Kietzman
In this case, Kietzman’s high profile worked against him. Had he been a lesser-known personality, with fewer listeners, he might have gotten away with it…might have stayed on the air.
But Kietzman is the main face — or talking head — of WHB, having been on the station since its rebirth as a sports-talk station more than 20 years ago and having worked as a TV sports announcer for a decade before that. He’s one of the two biggest guns at the station, along with Soren Petro, who has the 10-2 time slot, before “Between the Lines,” which airs from 2 to 6 weekdays.
Keitzman also is — or was — a part owner of the station, and his wife, Jessica Kietzman, is listed as a senior advertising account manager. The president of Union Broadcasting, the firm that owns WHB and a few other stations, is Chad Boeger, who, like Kietzman, has been at the station since its inception.
Boeger
It had to be difficult for Boeger to cut Kietzman loose, but Kietzman’s transgression was so bad it left Boeger little choice. The Kansas City Star made it easier for Boeger by weighing in with an editorial on Wednesday. The editorial said, in part…
“Invasive and presumptuous don’t begin to describe Kietzman’s rant. If the coach’s private life is fodder for this kind of public discussion — and it shouldn’t be — then how about some empathy instead? Or just the humility to know you’re absolutely out of your depth when deigning to judge another family’s parenting, with complete disregard for the adversity and anguish they’ve endured?”
**
Delving down another level on this episode, a major problem for Kietzman is that he always took himself too seriously. Where Petro is self-deprecating and often wickedly funny, Kietzman was pretentious and often bombastic. Politically conservative, he would sometimes stray into politics — not head on but peripherally — a big mistake for a sports personality trying to maintain a diverse audience.
Also, sports-talk radio is basically a wasteland. I listen to Petro sometimes, especially if I tune in and he’s talking about the Royals, but all the daytime sports-talk shows bludgeon listeners with commercials. If I’m listening, I turn the radio off when they go to a break and wait several minutes before tuning back in.
Besides the commercial overload, there is a dearth of interesting discussion material for the sports-talk guys. During the fall and winter, when college football and basketball are in season, there is more variety than during the summer months, when it’s essentially the Chiefs and Royals.
And so it was that Kietzman was blubbering about the Chiefs and the Tyreek Hill situation when he opened his mouth and verbalized an opinion he obviously had been thinking about for a while.
…Well, it will be interesting to see where Kietzman resurfaces. I believe he’s 55, so he probably won’t be retiring.
Who knows, maybe he’ll turn up on a Fox News cable network show. He could rub elbows with Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Having crossed one big line, he could easily bound across another.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
His comments were no more ridiculous than the ones that accused a group of very disciplined athletes of being “thugs’. The behavior is common. it’s called “roid rage”, but no one wants to blow the whistle on that because without their steroids, they would no longer be competitive at the professional level. Indeed, without rampant steroid use football itself would not be as interesting.
So blaming the coach for the side effects of the drugs his players need to be able to compete is silly unless you want to regulate drug usage throughout the league and that won’t happen.
Why must everything be reduced to politics? Very offensive — and tiring.
I used to listen to Kietzman when he first started, but over time it just became a lot of his repetitive rants about the same subjects. He also did not like guests that would challenge his opinions. So most of his guests/segments then became regular weekly (or more often) slots and they knew what Kietzman wanted (not contradicting him too strongly). So they have become predictable and not interesting. I also got the sense listening that the people who were his co-hosts/co-workers walked carefully on the show not to disagree with the boss too strongly. Also the regular fluff segments of Smoke and Fire and Jim Colborn’s golfing were immediate turn-offs for me.
That WHB went out and grabbed the Kansas athletics contract I think showed the first large public crack in the ownership group. Kietzman always portrayed himself as Mr. K-State and no matter what the business opportunity, he could not have been happy that the station dropped K-State athletics and went to Kansas athletics.
Another sign I think was Danny Clinkscale now showing up every Friday on Petro’s show after essentially getting canned off Kietzman’s show. I don’t think that happens without tacit approval from non-Kietzman management (even with it sponsored).
The Chief’s relationship is a big listener draw for WHB and this little event just gave the other owners the final push they needed to force him out. Hunting around, I read that Kietzman only owns 6% of Union Broadcasting, so the other 94% figured we’ll just buy him out to save the Chiefs relationship.
With the recent exception of Cody Tapp, it seems like the evening hosts WHB have hired try to do their best Kietzman impressions (talk and run their show like him) to impress Kietzman. I hope that will show a change moving forward.
I am not sure who will replace him. I think Petro’s show works best as a midday show because of the approach he uses. I am not sure how that would translate to afternoon drive time, but I am sure he could adjust if asked to.
I can see you’re well versed in the ins and outs of WHB’s operation, Bill. Thanks for the insights.
I hadn’t thought about KU/K State factor, but I knew, of course, about Kietzman’s love of the latter. Your speculation that that move caused a rift is very logical.
And as for Clinkscale, I think he’s a blowhard who’s out of his depth — especially next to Petro — but I found it interesting when he disappeared from Between the Lines. I remember one time when a conversation between him and Kietzman lurched into politics…Kietzman was on the “right” side and Clinkscale on the “left.”
To paraphrase you, maybe Clinkscale disagreed too strongly with the boss and became expendable.
A friend of mine who used to be in the radio business told me two things yesterday:
1. He expects that Kietzman had to sign (or had previously signed) a non-compete clause for some period of time after he leaves WHB. My friend said he had to do the same when he chose to leave two radio stations he worked for. While he said a lawyer told him the non-compete could probably be broken (all it took was time and money), he wasn’t interested as each new job was not in broadcasting.
2. While this incident got a lot of attention, it was likely an accumulation of factors that led Keitzman to being dismissed.
This blogging is such an interesting “business.” I was very careful with this post and thought it was free of errors. Then, this morning I got up to an email from a longtime friend, Jan Hodgson, who reminded me that WHB has been around a lot longer than 20 years. (I had written that WHB had its “inception” more than 20 years ago.)
Jan wrote:
“I just wanted to remind you that WHB goes back a lot farther than 20 years, and I’m surprised you don’t remember meeting Elvis or the Beatles on their Top 40 show…Maybe you didn’t grow up in KC…I just wanted you to be in the know as I doubt that I’m the only one who noticed.”
Well, I’ve been in KC almost 50 years, and I was well aware of WHB’s long history as one of the seminal rock ‘n’ roll stations. What I was thinking about when I wrote of the station’s inception was its rebirth as a sports-talk station. I have corrected the error.
…Even though I embarrass myself with silly errors from time to time, I appreciate the keen eye of you readers. Accuracy and careful reflection are always the goal. Keep holding my feet to the fire. And thank you, Jan!
With only a few occasional lapses, I quit listening to sports-talk radio years ago. Too often, their target audience seems to be male millennials (and millennial wannabes) with the mentality of a macho, beer-guzzling teenager. For better or worse, I fell out of that demographic a long time ago.
On a total tangent, I’m surprised you haven’t weighed in on the latest Jackson County/Frank White fiasco with the property appraisals. What a total mess.
Station 610 is much worse, overall, in regard to the frat-house approach. From the little I’ve heard from them, I don’t think any of those d-jays puts a reflective thought into anything before it comes out of their mouths. They just yammer on in the little air time they have between commercials.
I’ll probably write about the property-tax situation…Inadvertently, this might pave the way to a fresh start at the courthouse, with White and most of the incumbent legislators being thrown out. Taxpayers desperately need a reboot down there, with some quality elected officials, instead of a bunch of people slurping at the public trough.
A couple of notes:
1) WHB has been around since at least the early ’60s, when I would take my first portable am/fm radio to bed to listen to Bobby Darin, Elvis, early Beatles and the like;
2) I don’t listen to any form of talk radio, so I will take a priori your italicized quote of the “offensive” material. However, I find none of that offensive. Short of outright lies, there must have been some deep reading between the lines, as well as umbrage over crossing some imaginary midwestern ‘red line’ of manners involved. And even then, if he didn’t lie about anything, so what?
Ah, Bobby Darin…”Beyond the Sea” remains one of my favorite songs. For me, an innocent teenager grasping for romantic connections with girls, that song held out the prospect of a love waiting for me out there, somewhere.
WHB was 710 in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. And it was, I think they called it, ‘Top 40’. 810 bought out the call letters, maybe in the 90’s? Before that 810 it was KCMO radio, I think.
Very good clarification, Bill…I recall now that 810 was KCMO.
WHB in it’s heyday was one of the Storz Top 40 stations (controlled by the family that had owned the Storz Brewery in Omaha). Storz stations were considered trend setters in Top 40 AM radio formats. WHB suffered the same decline in the late 70s and early 80s that all AM Top 40 and Rock stations experienced as younger listeners switched to FM as FM radios spread among automobiles and homes.
After trying oldies in the late 1980s and then getting trounced by KCMO-FM, WHB after being sold switched to a Farm-based format from the early 1990s to late 1990s. In 1998 KCMO and WHB swapped frequencies and power. 710 is directional and only 10,000 watts daytime and 5,000 watts night time. 810 is 50,000 watts daytime and 10,000 at night (used to be more at night but Meredith when it owned the station they applied for and were allowed to decrease power to 10,000 watts at night).
Some WHB jingles from the 1960s:
Probably the only Top 40 station from the heyday that has large numbers of listeners today with direct heritage is WLS-FM in Chicago. The management there had enough foresight to begin simulcasting WLS as both AM and FM in the early 1980s. I remember reading the WLS program director being quoted at the time as saying adding the FM signal was like opening a store in the suburbs.
While WLS-AM has been News/Talk for over the past 25 years, WLS-FM plays a mix of Top 40 from late 60s into the 70s and 80s (much like KCMO-FM now does). And a number of jingles are played from the WLS-AM heyday. Until recently, they had some of the more well-known WLS-AM DJs still on the air. To show a music station can still draw, WLS-FM is usually 4th or 5th in overall listeners in the Chicago metro area while WLS-AM now ranks in low 20s.
I grew up in Columbia in the 50s and 60s listening to WHB on a console radio. Trying to feel hip an urban.
Good stuff, Bill (Hirt). The demise of the Oldies stations was awfully painful to me. 94.9 FM played some 70s and 80s songs — and a few from the 60s — until about 20 years ago, when they went to a newer format with a lot of disco songs. It has sucked ever since. In Louisville, WAKY came back as an FM station with a true Oldies format some years back, and it’s still doing that, to the best of my knowledge. I mostly listen now to the Sixties on Six and the Fifties on Five — Sirius XM radio — in the car. The songs are great and, best of all, no commercials.
I was a college student from ’68-’72 and used to listen to AM late at night while I studied. Ever hear KAAY in Little Rock? Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford eschewed “bubble gum” and played some great stuff. Got me through a lot of late-night studying.
Almost every one of us Baby Boomers has an Oldies station story — and fond memories of it. Thanks for yours, judge (former!), and welcome to the Comments Dept.
I know a lot of people do it but I could never listen to music and study. I get too distracted and my mind would go right to singing along.
That’s one reason you’re an “A” student, Gayle.
Are you implying Mr. Manners is not?
I won’t judge the judge. Mixing the music and the homework didn’t work for me, either.
Jim, I think I remember hearing/reading somewhere that WHB actually dates back to the mid- to late 1920s, that it was one of the early commercial radio stations in the country. Of course, in the ’60s for sure, the DJs collectively referred to themselves as the World’s Happiest Broadcasters, or WHB. They used to come out with the Top 40 survey in print form (4.25″ x 11″ maybe) every Friday afternoon, and we would rush down to the donut shop in downtown Olathe to see which Beatles song was atop the survey for that particular week. One of the on-air personalities – he had the late afternoon, early evening shift – was Johnny Dolan, who was introduced as “Rollin’ with Dolan.” I think Phil Jay was somewhere there in the mix, too.