The Grinch Behind 415 Media

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• Just like ftvlive, Rich has the talent agents as his main sources. Dare to mention that and he will kill the comments. The Bi-polar thing is pretty odd because one minute he is missing his mother (again!) or he is running his strange "Black Anchor" fantasy. Don't fall for his "special access" subscription offer. He really has awful bookeeping of his paid members. He is a C+ ebegger...but he does get a few scoops now and then...when he's not pretending to be a long gone newspaper gossip hack.

• You haven't even scratched the surface on Lieberman. I too used to believe the "he calls it like he sees it" no BS straight shooter persona he likes to play up. But I've since learned there's a lot more to the story. The crap that's gone on behind the scenes between Lieberman (and his manic depressive bi-polar personality) and the talent he writes about could keep Page Six busy for weeks. It's not just that he criticizes but plays favorites and you can be on his good side but if you ever do anything he takes personal offense to, whether valid or not, you are now permanently on his s__t list. He'll kiss your ass right up until you spurn him and then he turns and woe be you. The list of anchors/reporters who have experienced this behavior first hand is long. I once warned a talent coming to the Bay Area to steer clear of the guy. They didn't and they paid the price for interacting with him. I now make it a policy to warn everyone I can. Nobody deserves such treatment.

  He's made some massive mistakes on his site he still has not owned up to. And if anyone tries to point it out to him in the comments he s__t-cans the comment. That's his prerogative of course to keep the most validly critical comments off his site lest the less attuned readers he has catch on to just how much BS he gets away with.

  He has this game he plays where every few months such and such a talent is being courted by a network. Nobody ever jumps to the network and he never follows up. It's happened so many times that if those people had actually left for networks, Bay Area TV News would be decimated by the departures. There's a variation of this where such and such a talent who is obviously too old for consideration (or has some other automatically disqualifying characteristic) is somehow being offered big bucks to go to New York or L.A. Of course those moves never pan out either. Now whenever I see one of these stories show up on his blog, I immediately assume it's him making up another one to fill space.

  I'm in two minds about the campaign to go after his advertisers that the female talent launched. I don't like boycotts. They just rub me wrong. On the other hand, yes, he's absolutely misogynistic. If any national writer wrote nationally what he's written the way he's done it, they wouldn't have a job. Or advertisers. Full stop. Yet because he's local he flies under the radar just enough to skate by. That doesn't seem right to me. Plus, I kind of view this as retaliation for all the bile he's thrown at them. You fight from the gutter long enough, eventually someone's going to jump down and join you to take you on. Paybacks are a bitch.

  He obviously has sources. Nobody should question that point. And apparently many of his sources are accurate. At the same time he regurgitates/recycles a lot of his stuff. There's only so many different ways to say such and such news director has lost the newsroom before eagle eyed readers start catching on that he's got nothing new to add. But if he doesn't do it, it's not like he has a steady stream of stuff in the pipeline ready to go. So we get a lot of regurgitated filler in-between the "breaking news".

  I still read him because he does break news on occasion. But you have to have a very good filter on to separate all the BS from the actual news. A lot of his readers don't and take everything he says at face value when a lot of it is anything but.

  • I live in the Bay Area and I too read him (and occasionally write a comment). Rich does break the occasional scoop, and I enjoy reading many of my fellow commenters to his blog. But as "Long Time Reader" points out, he is very thin-skinned about hearing criticism, often "disappearing" comments that call him out for factual inaccuracies, misunderstandings of how things work (i.e., ratings), or his utter lack of spelling/typing/proofreading/editing abilities. However, he doesn't hesitate to let through comments that are thinly-veiled racism, misogynistic or childishly scatological. I've authored comments to his blog to correct inaccurate "facts", but those comments magically disappear way too often to be coincidence. Especially when so many others make the same claim. He has had a few advertisers in the past, but *nobody* is advertising there anymore. Think that's coincidence? He demands the right to keep insulting anyone he feels like attacking, politicians, media people and garden-variety readers alike, but then in the next breath begs for donations. Conflict of interest? I've wondered how many of the people he's been critical of have refused to donate to him, or had previously contributed but decided to stop, and whether there's any correlation there?

• You are wrong about Rich Lieberman. The fact is, that almost all of the time, he is RIGHT in his stories, especially those about what is happening behind the scenes in local media. And while he does not seem to be politically correct, who cares? I thought that was outlawed anyway during the previous administration. Anyway, while some of the local female anchors/reporters did sign a letter asking him to be taken down, every one of them all had axes to grind because of comments he made about them. The fact is, that the comments he makes are pretty much right on. He knows about the behind the scenes things at KTVU, KPIX, KGO, KNTV, KRON, etc, and when he writes about it, sometimes people don't like what he says, or think "no way", but in the end, whether its a few days later, etc, it comes out that once again, Rich was right and knew what he was writing about. Nobody else does what he does, in reporting news/etc behind the scenes in local media. He is a treasure that should be embraced and yes, he should be THANKED for what he does.

• I would give money for a time machine and go back to 1990 and tell everyone to jump off a cliff before they get to 9-11 much less today's freakshow.

• The people he ridicules have long since learned to disregard anything Lieberman says.

  His blog is for fans/non-fans of Bay Area TV (mostly) and radio (sparingly). Not for the folks who work within it.

  • Maybe so, but everyone in every newsroom in the Market reads him. Trust me.

    The problem with him runs way deeper. I’ll explain:

    Cutting to the chase, he is a jealous and bitter man. He laments the fact that he was never successful as a media personality in the Bay Area. Sure, he dabbled in radio, appeared in a commercial, was a panelist on local TV round tables (no pun intended) and was given a platform on the, then SF Chronicle affiliated, SF Gate as one of their “City Brights,” a local blogging section. A position he was fired from because of the misuse of a 49ers media credential. A lot of the players in SF media then turned their backs on him.

    Shortly thereafter, he got bitter and began to take aim at the local media via his blog. But that was disingenuous because in the meantime, he was sending emails to local media personalities and producers begging to be a part of their shows and/or letting him on-air. When that didn’t work, the toxicity really started. He would, unethically, write emails to local media personalities offering up a quid pro quo, vis a vie favorable coverage in his blog in exchange for airtime (I have seen/read these emails. They’re bad). On more than one occasion when he didn’t get what he wanted, he went scorched earth in his blog against an on-air talent and the show this person was on. Not a good look.

    Rich Lieberman is a disgrace. He is a bitter, name-calling, misogynist who deserves all the backlash and professional downfalls that have come his way. I haven’t even gotten into the way he tries to throw his weight around at local eating/drinking establishments. Restaurant managers and bartenders hate him. Where he drinks locally, I think it’s because he’s cheap and loud. On multiple occasions he will post false blind items about alleged affairs or trysts between people in the same newsroom, but it’s all lies. One time he made a reference alluding to a “romantic scandal and how it happened at a local restaurant. So I asked the bartender (friend of mine) who was, or would have been working the day and time Rich wrote about it and it never happened. They were incredibly upset that he used their establishment and vowed to not serve him if he ever came in.

    I don’t read him as much now, because he is just so damn negative. You can tell he’s a sad man in his posts. It feels dirty watching someone’s mental health decline right before your eyes. Furthermore, and this is his right, he deletes any critical comment about him or his content, in the comment section. Glass houses, I guess. Plus, his comment section reads like the scribbling of patients at a metal hospital. Racist, bigoted, ultra right wing whack jobs who are screaming into the void. These people make the YouTube and Yahoo! comment sections sound sane. Almost.

    In closing, while people in newsrooms read him, his words carry a lot less weight than they did when he first started. I actually liked his City Brights blogs. But now, if you’re a masochist, go ahead and click on415 Media. But when you read his words, take them with a pound of salt.

  • I’m sure it’s difficult for the media members to read —criticism is always a hard pill to swallow. Lieberman, however harsh, seems to hit the nail on the head every time. He also seems to scoop everyone else in the business.

• Not the place to go if you want to know... what's right/if there's anything that's good ...about Bay Area media.