Why you're (probably) wrong about Paul Finebaum

PAUL FINEBAUM ON STAGE WITH UA PROFESSOR DR. ANDREW C. BILLINGS IN AUGUST 2021.

I fear this post will infuriate everyone who ever worked with me in The Birmingham News sports department.

Paul Finebaum will be inducted Thursday into the Hall of Fame of the University of Alabama College of Communication (where I work) and I think it’s deserved.

I offer this perspective as a competitor when Finebaum worked for The Birmingham Post-Herald, and as a guest on his show – the local radio version, not the current national TV/radio version – a half-dozen times or so. Over the years he said good and bad things about The News. I think my former colleagues mostly remember the bad.

Like him or not, you can respect the prominence he has achieved as a commentator for ESPN and the SEC Network. Beyond that, what word do you associate with him? Outrageous? Brash? Loudmouth? Well, if so, that’s part and parcel of sports talk radio and TV. Compared to some others, he’s almost restrained.

I listened occasionally when I was in the business. Certainly, I’m aware of some moments – either said by Finebaum or allowed to be said by a caller – that dropped my jaw for being beyond the pale. Some of his callers are indeed nuts.

“We’ve cornered the market on insanity,” he told an unsurprisingly large group of UA students during an August 2021 event of the Alabama Program in Sports Communication. (Finebaum gives generously of his time for guest speaking at UA. He has also invited two of my students to appear on his show.)

But the show has also produced some powerfully affecting moments, real news and even public service. A sense of community created by the show emerges when, for instance, a longtime regular caller passes away.

With any media commentator, the actual words matter more than the intent. But I’ve always given Finebaum credit for acknowledging, usually in academic settings, that he’s an “actor” playing a role. And over time he has changed how he plays it, he says. These days, according to him, you’ll hear less of his own opinion, fewer rants, fewer hot takes.

““We are in the entertainment business,” he said at APSC. “(But) we try to do things right.”

Even as he acts and entertains, he still flashes journalistic chops, and I think that’s what many people overlook. He’s a very good interviewer (first hand knowledge here). His blunt questioning of Nick Saban on live TV about the non-suspension of a star player in 2016 was a massively impressive moment of accountability journalism that not every reporter would have had the gumption to try. Going back 40 years, Finebaum earned awards for sports investigative reporting at the Post-Herald. He broke stories in his columns.

In grad school I wrote a research paper about the history of sports writing in Alabama (one grad research paper = instant expert). An interviewee, a sports writer who has been on the scene in Alabama longer than me or Finebaum, offered that the 1980 arrival of this new Post-Herald reporter recently out of the University of Tennessee marked the start of a sea change in state sports writing from non-critical, blind-eye reporting in the ‘60s and ‘70s to more aggressive questioning of powerful sports figures that continues today.

That’s an essential mindset for sports journalism in Alabama and everywhere. Igniting that transformation seems Hall of Fame worthy to me.