Profile of Howie Carr on Famous Like Me

Howard Lawrence "Howie" Carr (born 1952) is an American broadcaster and award winning journalist, and the number one drive-time talk-radio host in the greater Boston area and New England.

Carr is a native of Portland, Maine, a graduate of Deerfield Academy and of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He now lives in Wellesley, and is married, with five daughters.

Aside from broadcasting, he is an award-winning front-page columnist for the Boston Herald. Known for his scathing exposes of local politicians, he has raised lots of eyebrows and voices over the years. The day after President Clinton testified, C-SPAN broadcast Carr's entire show.

As well as being heard on WRKO AM 680, he is syndicated across the country and streamed on-line through his Web site. He has interviewed numerous politicians, authors, and celebrities. He has worked as a reporter and commentator for Boston television stations WGBH and WLVI. In 1980–81, Carr was the Boston City Hall bureau chief of the Boston Herald American, and he later worked as the paper's State House bureau chief. As a political reporter for WNEV (now WHDH), his coverage of then mayor Kevin White was so relentless that after the mayor announced he wasn't running again, he told the Boston Globe that one of the things he enjoyed most about his impending retirement was not having Carr chase him around the city.

In 1985, he won the National Magazine Award, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for Essays and Criticism. In television, he has been nominated for an Emmy Award. Carr starred as himself in the 1998 John Travolta film A Civil Action.

For years Carr has had an ongoing feud with former fellow Herald columnist Mike Barnicle, calling him a "hack" and giving out his home phone number. Barnicle called Carr "a pathetic figure" and asked "Can you imagine being as consumed with envy and jealousy toward me for as long as it has consumed him?"

In 2002, the Herald reported Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy said of a fourteen-year old rape victim: "Tell her to get over it". In the ensuing controversy, a February 20 column by Carr mentioned Murphy's daughters in passing and visitors to Carr's chatroom posted the name of Murphy's hometown and said someone should "rape all of his daughters twice". Murphy and witnesses said he never made those comments in the courtroom and in 2005 Murphy won a $2.09 million libel suit. During the trial Murphy testified after reading Carr's column "I wanted to kill Howie Carr".

The Howie Carr Show

For about the last twenty years, Carr has had a radio talk show originating from WRKO, but in September 1996 the show experimented with local syndication, sending the show out via ISDN connections to a handful of stations around New England. The local experiment was such a success thatin January 1998 ABC Radio started syndicating the show nationally.

Listeners can call Carr's "Chump Line" and leave an amusing message which might be played in the third hour of the show each week day. The show also features other contests, like the "Celebrity Death Pool" or the "Wizard of Uhz". In the latter, Carr plays a clip of the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, and the listeners have to guess how many "uh"s the Senator says.

Carr likes to follow the career of mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; he even has a section of his website called "Whitey Watch". His book The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century, which documents the crimes and actions of Bulger and his politically active brother Billy Bulger and their impact on Massachusetts, is due to be released on February 23, 2006 by Warner Books.

Although Carr equates Massachusetts low-digit license plates with political "hacks", he holds a low-digit plate as a winner of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles 2004 Low Number Plate Lottery .

Carr is also known by various nicknames on his show: "Captain", "El Cheapo", and "Paper Boy".

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Howie Carr