NEW YORK – Well, that didn’t take long.
Rocker-turned-radio host David Lee Roth, who accepted the no-win task of replacing ratings king Howard Stern in January, was bounced from the airwaves Friday after barely three months on the air in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and four other markets.
“I was booted, tossed, and it’s going to cost somebody,” Roth said on his last show, intimating that his lawyers would go after CBS Radio for the full compensation due from his reported $4 million contract. The timing of the move was interesting: It arrived just days before the Roth show’s first Arbitron numbers.
CBS Radio spokeswoman Shavonne Harding said the company would have an announcement soon on its plans. She declined any other comment, and would not say who will replace the former Van Halen frontman on Monday’s morning drive time shift.
Roth said he was only told about the syndicated show’s demise while riding in a car to the WFNY-FM studios in Manhattan.
His replacements will be shock jocks Greg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia – currently available only to the 6.5 million listeners on XM satellite radio.
Hughes and Cumia’s syndicated show was yanked from radio in August 2002 after airing a live account of listeners having sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The company that silenced the duo was the same one that just hired them back, CBS Radio.
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