Severin stands by his phony claim that he won a Pulitzer Prize for online journalism and possesses a Masters Degree from Boston University

Following is a transcript of Jay Severin's response to a caller's question on 01/03/06 regarding Scot Lehigh's column titled "Severin's Phony Pulitzer" and the Boston Herald's Inside Track story about his Masters Degree (09/26/05).

Caller: One other question and I'm going to ask this one for the benefit of
my kids. We've been listening for a long time. There was a lot of situations
that occurred here after and around your departure that, for my 16-year-old kids, I'd
like them to have the benefit of your explanation as to what actually
happened. When are you going to address that and how are you going to
address that?

Severin: I'm not quite sure I understand your question, Paul.

Caller: In other words, the Scot Lehigh article in the Boston Globe, the issue of (your) degrees...all the other things that have made the rounds up here in Boston.

Severin: I'm going to have to figure out a way to do that, Paul, because I now have the opportunity to speak to an audience who has the blessing of not having to see the Boston Globe every day, and also because so much of what the Boston Globe has written about me has been untrue. So much of it has been false. There are an awful lot of people in radio and in public life who can claim that they've been maligned and misquoted and abused by a major medium. But there are very few people who can actually claim that one of the giant newspapers in the United States of America wrote something about him that was so false that they had to print a correction and a retraction - which the Boston Globe did about me. (Editor's note: this retraction pertained to Severin's comments in April, '05 regarding Muslims; it had nothing to do with this matter of his journalism credentials.) So why should I give columnists who are pant-load, pizza-eating slobs more attention -- by denying false things they say -- than talking about things that we think are fun?
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This response indicates that Jay Severin stands by his repeated claims during 2004 and 2005 that he possesses a Pulitzer Prize for Online Journalism and a Masters Degree from Boston University. Now the question necessarily becomes: what else has Severin lied about?

(Many thanks go out to Brian R. for providing us the audio needed for generating this transcript.)

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Letter from a young Severin listener regarding Severin's "credentials" controversy

Dear Mr. Aucoin,
I work for my school paper and plan to write an article on radio host Jay Severin and some of the inconsistencies in his claims. I was wondering if I may be able to ask you a question about Severin. While you provide a wealth of information on your site (thank you by the way), I would like to ask you to provide more insight into Mr. Severin's comments about winning a Pulitzer Prize and having a Masters degree from BU? Why do you suppose Severin has not backed down from his Pulitzer and Masters comments though they are clearly false?

Eugene

Dear Eugene,
Well you picked a doozy of a question. The Pulitzer Prize and Masters degree controversies are important because they go to the heart of Severin's very trustworthiness. In his business, Jay can't be seen as a liar, because who wants to listen to someone who might not be speaking truth? So you are wise to focus on these issues.

The controversy began in around 2002, when Severin began mentioning his college studies in journalism and in law. While he was always careful to clarify (on the air) that he had never actually graduated from law school, he was not as careful regarding his journalism credentials...i.e., he claimed he'd taken a Masters degree in journalism from BU and had won a Pulitzer Prize for online journalism. Also around this time, he began claiming that his show was comprised of 3 attributes: "news, analysis and commentary." By including "news" in that set of attributes, he was once again leading his audience to believe he was a "newsman," i.e., a journalist. Unfortunately for Jay, the Boston Herald contacted BU in October, 2005, and learned that Severin had never in fact taken a degree there. Also, the Boston Globe's Scot Lehigh wrote on September 16, 2005 that Severin had never won a Pulitzer Prize. Severin was quoted by Lehigh as having responded to the phoney Pulitzer accusation by saying:

"What I said was, there is a prize that my editor told me is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism,"

This response to Lehigh's charge was a new spin, which I had never heard Jay say on the air. As far as I recall, he'd always said plainly that he had won a "Pulitzer Prize" for his online writings. So he was basically caught red-handed in a lie. And a very stupid lie, since it was easily investigated and disproved. My personal hunch is that Jay probably was told by some (butt-kissing) editor that he had won some Pulitzer-esque prize, and then he, full of his own self-importance as usual, ran with the idea and began to embellish it...and foolishly got carried away.

Now, I'm the first person to forgive a foolish mistake (since I'm also mistake prone), but Jay really should come clean before expecting his listeners' forgiveness. And if you've read the (above) transcript of the phone call on January 3rd where he continued to deny he'd ever lied, then you know he doesn't intend to come clean.

But why would Severin lie only about his journalism credentials, and not about his law credentials?

My guess as to why Jay chose not to lie about his law credentials is because he has far more respect for the institution of law than he has for the institution of journalism. Why? Because he sees journalism as hopelessly leftist and corrupted. And so, since he has no regard for modern journalism, it's not such a sacrilege, in his mind, to assume his eligibility to practice it...i.e., to assume he's just as worthy as, say, Dan Rather to report "news." Again, these are just my hunches...as a longtime listener of Severin. I'm no formal expert in human behavior.

To sum up...I think that Jay Severin is an excellent talk show host. But like anyone else, he is a flawed human being. So my inclination is to forgive him of his credentials "sins" ....even if he never owns up to them. After all, we have all been in tough situations where we have not had the courage to come clean about something foolish we have done. And we all hope that people will forgive us even in those circumstances.

In the end, we hopefully learn from our mistakes (whether or not we own up to them) and we never repeat the same mistakes twice. I suspect and hope that Jay Severin has learned his lesson and will never again lie about his credentials.

Thanks for writing,
Rich

Note:
The direct URL for this page is www.jayseverin.org/page5.html