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WTIC’s Brian Schactman Wanted To, And Has Done, It All

Then a chance meeting with a producer at ESPN.com sparked what became a globetrotting television and radio career at ESPN, NBC Connecticut, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC10 Boston and NECN.

Jim Cryns

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“On my bucket list was a World Cup soccer game and seeing a game show,” Brian Shactman says.

“I graduated from college in 1994, and my buddy’s mom had a place in Southern California, so we went out there to work” Shactman explained. “We went on the last day of taping for The Price is Right. We were out drinking for most of the night before, but we sobered up and went to Television City at like five in the morning.”

Shactman said when you entered the studios, you were greeted by the producers of the show. They ask you a single question.

“I’m guessing they put you in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ pile,” Shactman said. “When they asked me a follow-up question, I knew it was ‘on’. When the producer came out before the show, we locked eyes and I knew I was going to be a contestant. Mine was the fourth name called.”

Johnny, tell him what he’s won.

“I won a refrigerator, which I sold. I won a cabinet, which I gave to my brother for his wedding. And I got two recliner chairs. I gave one to my buddy, and I had the other one until 2014 when my wife told me it was time to part with them. It was the chair or her.”

Shactman has done so much television since the game show appearance, it’s hard to believe there was a time he was nervous in front of the camera. “Here I was with Bob Barker. I used to skip school to watch him. It was surreal. The studio is a lot smaller than you’d think. It felt like I was on a sitcom.”

Shactman is no slouch in the education department. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and later Amherst College.

“Amherst is very different today than it was in the early 90s,” Shactman says. “It’s a liberal arts college in New England. Very politically correct. But it was small. Our student body was about the same size as one class in a bigger college. There were a lot of smart people around all the time. It was rather humbling. Many have gone on to do some great things. The captain of our hockey team went on to become a surgeon. I wasn’t used to not being one of the smartest guys in the room.”

All Shactman did growing up was play sports. His mom wanted him to diversify a bit.

“I think my mom started freaking out and began taking me to museums. I was so focused on hockey in high school, even though I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.”

The family loved the Red Sox, though Shactman never went to games as a kid. His first professional games were at the Boston Garden in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, where he remembers watching the Bruins and a classic Celtics- Sixers playoff game.

“Once the Red Sox won the Series in 2004, things changed for me,” said Shactman, who still has season tickets but only goes to a few a year now. “I saw the team win three more World Series, but it’s not the same for me anymore. Some of the grittiness is gone. I like to cheer, but now people look at you like you have three heads. I still like to take my kids to some games though.”

His one time love of the game and team rubbed off on his wife. But not right away.

“When I met my wife, Jess Matzkin, she was working in education. I’d go to bed at 9 pm, and she would start watching the Red Sox games as background noise. Then she started to get to know the players. In the 2004 ALCS, we went to Game 3 together (where the Sox were routed by the Yankees), and we had two tickets to Game 4. I couldn’t go, and she couldn’t find anyone to go with her. Finally, after the fifth or sixth ask, Jess got someone to go. And it was one of the greatest games ever.”

His first job was teaching at The Taft School, a prep school in Connecticut. Then he went back to coach hockey at his alma mater, Amherst College.

“(After that) I didn’t think I wanted to coach anymore, so I enrolled in graduate school to study English Literature. By my third day in graduate school, I realized that wasn’t for me. Then I started covering sports.”

Then a chance meeting with a producer at ESPN.com sparked what became a globetrotting television and radio career at ESPN, NBC Connecticut, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC10 Boston and NECN.

Shactman currently is the host of Brian & Company from 5:30-9 am on WTIC NewsTalk 1080 in Connecticut.

“I was on TV in Boston when my wife took a job in Connecticut at Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, so I was commuting back and forth. I didn’t want to do TV in Connecticut again. This opportunity at WTIC just came my way.” His biggest break was back in 2013 when he took over as regular host of Way Too Early on MSNBC when Willie Geist had moved on to the Today Show.

Why is Willie Geist so likable?

“Willie in real life is a very confident, witty, accessible guy,” Shactman says. “You never feel like he’s condescending. My wife likes him, too. He’s smart, self-effacing. We used to watch his father Bill Geist when he did his humor pieces on CBS Sunday Morning. Bill’s pieces were always fun. Willie may have gotten some breaks because of his father, but he also worked his way up.”

Shactman said during the Great Recession, Morning Joe came to the forefront and changed TV news.

“It was a show that I wanted to be on,” Shactman says. “A guy who worked on the show was from Hartford. I told him when Erin Burnett, Jim Cramer, or Dylan Ratigan couldn’t do it, to use me. Joe and I are both Red Sox fans so we sort of hit it off.”

At ESPN, he worked on SportsCenter, ESPN.com, and ESPN Radio.

If he had it all to do over again, Shactman actually said he wishes he’d done more acting.

“In high school, I started appearing in plays. Senior year, I was going to be on the lacrosse team, but I knew I wasn’t going to play in college, so I auditioned. I was in two really somber plays, but I loved it. If I had the guts, I would have gone into acting.”

He said so much of his personal identity was as an athlete. Shactman was afraid not to be an athlete.

“That’s why I went to boarding school. I’m glad I took that chance. I loved the way audiences responded. I don’t think I had the range to be a professional, but it was a fantastic experience.”

Reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles made Shactman want to go to boarding school.

“I had to read Moby Dick twice. Once in college and once in graduate school.”

My sympathies.

“If I would sum up my literary leanings, I’d have to say historical fiction and American History. I gravitated to Ivan Doig in graduate school.

Shactman wrote his masters thesis on the American West. He explored immigration in Montana. He looked at the sweeping history of the West and the Mountain Man era.

“It was so dangerous back then,” Shactman said. You could turn the corner and someone could kill you.”

Shactman said violence is and was a part of our fabric in this country.

“We have some horrible things going on in our country right now,” Shactman says. “Looking back, violence has been a huge part of this country’s history.

He’s obsessed with American History, and right now, he’s listening to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan.

“There were 13 colonies that really had nothing in common. It’s amazing they ever united in the first place. It was Thomas Hobbes who said man’s natural state is a state of war. I’m a pacifist, and at war, I’d be dead in a minute.”

He said he’s not extremely social, but does belong to a Dude’s Book Club.

“We’re reading All God’s Children. It’s about how the tradition of Southern violence and racism has long affected and still haunts one black family. The guy was in prison without parole because of his violent actions. They trace his family’s history to show you the foundation of violence in his life.”

Shactman only registered to vote for a party once. He’s an independent and tries to avoid getting into politics on his show. He said it doesn’t go anywhere.

“I tried to get the two silos to talk to each other, and thought it would work. But it didn’t. People only hear what they want to hear. Both sides hated me at the same time. I don’t know, maybe we’re on the back nine as a country.”

Back at the beginning at ESPN, Shactman aspired to be the Peter Gammons of hockey journalism and said there were a few journalists he looked to for inspiration.

“I always admired Brian Williams. He lied and was held accountable. When he took over the evening news though, he was visiting the affiliates and our whole news crew had lunch with him. He’s unnervingly funny and smart. What sold me on him was after the BP oil spill in Louisiana, I watched him start NBC Nightly News, live in person. He was 100 yards away from the camera, and he didn’t have a notepad or teleprompter. But he gave this amazing 45 second opening that was poignant and smart. I remember thinking I could never do what that guy just did. He delivered the goods.”

“I don’t like it when people lie to my face. Look me in the eye and lie. People can be evasive, that’s one thing. But don’t lie to me just because you can. When Roy Williams dressed down Bonnie Bernstein. It was her job to ask the question, and he was so awful to her.”

Roy, shape up. Try to be more like Brian Shactman.

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BNM Writers

Dagen McDowell Is Ready For A New Adventure With Fox Business

“Every decision in America is born of policy, On the show, we bring that to our show. Talk about the news of the day.”

Jim Cryns

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To know Dagen McDowell, you must understand what she comes from, where she comes from. You won’t know her until you know the lessons, kindness, and determination set forth by her parents.

Her parents operated a small grocery store, LW Roark and Company. Charles and Joyce McDowell were high school sweethearts and both went to college but decided to go back home and open a business. “This is in the middle of nowhere,” McDowell said. “It was a wholesale grocery store. They sold it in the late 90s.”

She said her parents were smart, encouraging, and took every opportunity to teach McDowell and her brother.

“They’d constantly talk up people who came into the store. Both of them have and had an insatiable curiosity about everything. They felt they learned things through their customers. It was more fun to learn about things from other people.”

McDowell’s parents never took a week off work. Never. The family took no vacations as most families would. Once while McDowell was in college at Wake Forest University, the family visited the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in D.C.

“Both of my parents were very interested in architecture and landscapes. We’d go to Williamsburg and just look at the buildings.”

McDowell joined FOX News Channel in 2003 and helped launch FOX Business Network as a founding anchor in 2007.

Her mother passed away three years ago and her father is still very much a part of her life. Her father was a constant teacher.

“One time my father, who we called Dowell McDowell, was putting up an outbuilding and asked me how long one line should be if the other line was such and such. He taught me the Pythagorean theorem when I was about 4 years old.”

McDowell was nurtured by parents with endless curiosity.

“I was raised by parents who would always debate and converse around the dinner table. We shared breakfast and dinner together every day. They loved learning, were always inquisitive, never afraid to ask a question. My parents shared a fearlessness and passed that on to me. I’ve never been embarrassed to ask people questions. I love talking to people and finding out about things.”

For a long time, McDowell had no idea what she wanted to do for a living. She knew if she worked at different jobs she’d eventually figure out what she was good at.

“I knew I was a decent writer, but I always tried to get information out of people, what they were doing. Ask if they were fulfilled and happy.”

At Wake, Forest McDowell majored in art history and had every intention of working in a museum, possibly as a curator.

“I interned at the Center for Contemporary Arts. I lived in Venice, Italy for a while. Wake Forest owns a house in Venice.”

After that it was Colorado. She moved back to New York during the recession of 1991 with a duffel bag. She took the Amtrak to New York City and sublet an apartment for six months.

“I had no TV, just a radio. I knew I could find something good to do in New York, there were so many jobs. I always wanted to live in the city. Either the city or way out in the country. Nowhere in between.”

She said being in New York made her feel anything was possible. This was January in 1994 when job ads were still in the physical newspaper, like the New York Times. McDowell interviewed at Institutional Investor through a referral from a friend.

“It was a brilliant magazine with terrific writing,” McDowell explained. “Very prominent in the industry. They were looking for someone to work with the newsletter written for the financial community.”

She’d cover topics like the bond business, Wall Street, and money management. The magazine made her take a reporting test where you’d make up a story and write it. She was offered a job and worked there for three years.

“I learned to be a journalist there,” McDowell said. “I could write but I became a better journalist. We’d break news, create our sources, and learn more and more about finance. People love to talk about what they do if you show interest.”

The next big job was SmartMoney.com, a resource and web newspaper for private investors. There McDowell wrote a personal finance column. She started doing commentary on television shows, the way a lot of people in different professions tend to do. “Then I started making more appearances on weekend financial or business shows,” McDowell said.

She got a call from Neil Cavuto about 20 years ago and he told McDowell, ‘Kid, you want a job? I know you don’t have much professional TV experience. We’ll give you some training and you’ll figure it out. If you do, you stay. If not, you go.’

McDowell said she was glad she was a writer first before she arrived at Fox. She writes her own scripts and has a background in finance and business writing.

“Before the business network was launched, they had only one business reporter and two senior business correspondents,” she said. “I’ve gotten to do so many different jobs, use different muscles, so to speak. As the years have passed I’ve discovered other talents I may have and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”

There’s a new show in town. McDowell and Sean Duffy will co-host The Bottom Line which will air on weeknights from 6-7:00 PM ET.

McDowell said she and Duffy come from extremely similar backgrounds. Duffy is from rural Wisconsin and McDowell is from Virginia.

“We know what small-town living is like, “McDowell said. “I might live in New York City but where I grew up affects the way I view the world. I’m still grounded in my hometown. On the show, we look south and west with everything we cover. You have to think of your audience. Rather than talking about them, we talk with them. That’s our shared background and vision. Sean is extremely down to earth and generous.”

McDowell said the show is not financially based, but steeped in business.

She said Duffy’s experience as a former U.S. Congressman, he understands policy as well as financial matters.

“Every decision in America is born of policy,” she said. “On the show, we bring that to our show. Talk about the news of the day.”

This is different from anything McDowell has done in the past.

“It’s a two-anchor show in the evening,” she explained. “This is not taking place during market hours. We tie all the business happenings together from the day. Again, it’s not about Washington or New York. It’s about the people we grew up with. We talk to them. Build a relationship with them on the air. For me, this is not just sitting in front of a camera. I can run off at the mouth as well as anyone, hang in there with the filibuster.”

McDowell says she is blunt, but hopes she isn’t rude. During a recent interview for the new show she used the terms ‘pig potatoes’ and ‘chapped backsides.’

“Those are terms I just made up,” she said. “I make up a lot of phrases and don’t always know what they mean. I have an entire repertoire of those kinds of phrases.”

Duffy assumed they were southern phrases he had to learn from McDowell, but she assured him she’d never heard them anywhere else.

“I’m just making stuff up,” McDowell said. “You can’t curse. Can’t say BS. At least you shouldn’t say BS on television. You don’t want to say manure. You never want to say something that makes people wince or evokes a smell.”

Dealing with people directly and bluntly seems to come from her mother.

“My mother had grit,” McDowell said. “She was also very kind, never syrupy. I used to say she had no magnolia-mouth.

That’s got to be a southern phrase.

McDowell said her mother was not a servile flatterer, but she was kind. Always there when somebody was in need.

“She had real grit. She’d stand and fight for her friends and family members.”

Her mother passed away after being diagnosed with stage-four cancer.

“She went through unimaginable pain,” McDowell said of her mother. “For nearly six years. You want to talk about somebody who was tough. There was nobody more pugnacious than my mother.”

She explained even with her illness, her mother was always on the go. Continuing to live her life. When questioned about being so active while she was ill, her mother continued to show grit.

“My mother would say she didn’t want to walk around looking like she had cancer. She asked, ‘What choice do I have? I could lay in bed and wait to die, or I can get up and do what I can .’”

McDowell said her mother’s illness taught her to be a caregiver in ways she never could have imagined. Her mother taught her to find moments of joy every single day, in the smallest of things.

“It can be as simple as telling a stranger to have a great day. Treat a perfect stranger with kindness. I do it all day long. I know it sounds corny, but I want to be known as a person who brings a casserole to a friend when they’re ill.”

A one-sheet from Fox tells you McDowell and the culmination of her background is perfect for The Bottom Line. The fact is, it’s true.

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Airing The Tyre Nichols Video Was A Necessity

There were hard moments to watch in those videos, hard sounds to hear. But they aired.

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Far be it for me not to address this outrageous and embarrassing instance in humanity. After the videos of Memphis police brutally beating Tyre Nichols were shown on television there really seemed to be more outrage emerging from society this time than from the media, for a change. One would think that’s how we wish things to be.

In instances like this, where the video and audio images are far from brief but are instead chaptered as they unfold, there are few options other than to let them run their course. Clocks — breaks hard and soft — are out the window, just as in live coverage.

Because that’s what this was, only the live this time was us, and as we all absorbed and reacted to actions disapprovingly familiar yet somehow foreign at the same time, the impact was still becoming apparent even though we already knew the outcome.

It’s happened before.

Not always like this but we’ve seen it before, police encounters shown on the news overtakes and become the news.

It takes effect as the sights and sounds are digested, dissected, and discussed, often before their potential impact could really be imagined.

In 1991, when the Handycam footage crossed screens for the first time and we learned Rodney King’s name, we didn’t know then but we had a feeling.

We were on the right track, though as newsrooms evolved and street reporting incorporated a different type of storytelling.

I was a cop in 1991. Changes came. Some.

It’s 2023, I’m no longer a cop. Changes will come again. Some.

Turning points — or the overused watershed moments — mean just as much to the news media as they do to law enforcement.

The “why’s” that make this a turning point are more society and community based this time around than they were in 1991.

At least I think so. And I don’t think it makes a bit of difference who’s involved this time.

There were hard moments to watch in those videos, and hard sounds to hear. But they aired. Where they couldn’t air, they were described in great detail; descriptions sometimes can be worse than the real thing. Sometimes, not this time.

And they should air, they shouldn’t stop airing. This is what happened and this is what people need to see and hear and this is exactly why we are here.

Warn them, provide them with a heads up that they’re not going to like what happens next. It’s life and we show life, and we show what some of us do with it when it’s someone else’s.

Overall, I would say the news platforms held their composure, even after the videos were released. I saw, read, and heard some refreshingly neutral coverage, even from outlets where I expected hard turns into the lanes on either side of the road.

Legitimate questions were asked by anchors and reporters and much of the time, the off-balance issues were raised more by those on the sidewalks and those on the other side of the cameras and microphones.

As much as I find myself in disagreement with what I often see on the cable networks — all the cable networks — I did find a sense of symmetry watching CNN’s Don Lemon speak with Memphis City Council Chair Martavius Jones in the hours after the videos were released.

Regular protocols be damned, Lemon and producers lingered patiently as Jones, visibly overcome by emotion, struggled to regain breath and composure enough to be able to speak. Rather than cut away or move to other elements, they stood fast and it became an example of what often requires no words.

There were fewer punches pulled on other platforms as well.

The sounds of the screams, the impacts, and the hate-filled commands were broadcast through car radios.

As were Tyre Nichol’s calls for his mom. They aired. They had to.

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Does the Republican Establishment Get It?

For many it seemed that the Republican establishment stood idly by as Democrats changed the rules and worked behind the scenes to alter elections.

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In a move that seemed to go against the wishes of the patriotic American grassroots, the Republican party on Friday re-elected RNC Chairperson Ronna McDaniel. 

The media immediately took notice, as many on television and radio are now wondering why the party would re-elect a chairperson who has been so unpopular with the base of its party. 

Grant Stinchfield discussed this issue Friday night on his program, Stinchfield Tonight, which airs on Real America’s Voice network.

“Ronna McDaniel holds on to her chairmanship of the Republican Party. By a whopping total of — what were the numbers– 111 to 54. Harmeet Dhillon only received 54 votes. Mike Lindell 4 votes. This is proof to me that the Republican establishment is dug in,” Stinchfield — formerly of Newsmax — said. “Don’t tell me they’re out of touch. See, you tell me they’re out of touch, that implies ignorance. They’re not ignorant about anything.”

As sentiment for Dhillon grew in the days leading up to Friday’s vote, many influential politicians and party donors publicly offered her their support and endorsement. These included Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), as well as donors Mike Rydin, Dick Uihlein, and Bernie Marcus.

Also on board were musician and outspoken conservative John Rich, along with the state GOP of Nebraska and Washington State. Countless journalists and media personalities, such as Charlie Kirk, Miranda Divine, and Lou Dobbs, also came out publicly in support of Dhillon. Former President Donald Trump remained neutral, not making a public choice of either of the three candidates.

For many of Dhillon’s supporters, the deciding factor was public sentiment across the party’s base.

“They’re reading the same chat boards. They’re getting the same emails I’m reading. I will literally post something about this race when I was supporting Harmeet Dhillon. There was not one comment – not one – that supported Ronna McDaniel. Everyone wanted change,” Stinchfield said, noting that the party elite saw the same groundswell of support for change.

“Now, nobody has an issue as Ronna McDaniel is some evil kind of person. I don’t believe she is. I believe, though, that she is part of the establishment. She’s been around too long as far as the establishment goes. And she’s been ingrained in doing business as usual. It’s not working.”

In making their choices known, many Dhillon supporters simply pointed to the scoreboard during McDaniel’s reign.

“Think about where we are. 2018, we lost the House. 2020, we lost everything. 2022, we won the House, but we should have really steamrolled the House and we should have taken back the Senate, which we didn’t do,” Stinchfield said. “That means we’re on a real losing track since she took over. I don’t like being on a losing track. I like being on a winning track.

“Something has got to change when you talk about all of this. So how does Ronna McDaniel get 111 votes and Harmeet Dhillon only get 54 votes, when everyone, every Republican voter I talk to said it was time for change?” pondered Stinchfield.

And even more than the losses, for many it seemed that the Republican establishment stood idly by as Democrats changed the rules and worked behind the scenes to alter elections. The most recent example of which came in Arizona, where presumptive gubernatorial favorite, Kari Lake, was “defeated” when countless voting irregularities occurred in some of the state’s most deep-red areas.

“Under her watch, Democrats instituted a mail-in ballot scheme. That may be even worse than losing, when you talk about the House and the Senate and all these things. The fact that we now have a junk mail-in ballot scheme across the country under Ronna McDaniel’s watch is serious trouble. Very serious trouble,” Stinchfield said on Friday. “And so the reason it is is because the Democrats are rigging the system.”

For years – until Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and took the world by storm – the Republican party had the reputation of being the party of the rich. Rush Limbaugh used to refer to this wing of Republicans as “the country club crowd.” President Donald Trump flipped the narrative completely, offering a clear vision of hope and patriotism to working-class America.

Reputable polling — such as Richard Baris’ Big Data Poll — consistently showed Trump running well ahead of almost every Republican candidate during the 2022 mid-term election cycle. In other words, Trump still maintains considerably more support across the country than most of the individual Senate or House candidates experienced.

Many experts believe this is because voters still view Trump as an outsider, while they view the Republican party much less favorably.

“Let’s tell you how out of touch they are, how elitist they are,” Stinchfield said, calling out the GOP establishment. “This meeting that went on, do you know where it is? It’s at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch in California. One of the most expensive resorts in America. You’re lucky if you get a room for a thousand dollars a night down there on Dana Point. Now, it’s a beautiful hotel, but why is the Republican Party holding an event there? Then I went back and I looked at what RedState did. RedState went back and looked at some of the expenses that the Republican Party under Ronna McDaniel’s leadership was spending money on.

“Take a look at this. $3.1 million on private jets. $1.3 million on limousine and chauffeur services. $17.1 million on donor mementos. $750,000 on floral arrangements. Now you compare this to the Democrats. The Democrats spent $35,000 on private airfare. A thousand dollars on floral arrangements. A thousand. Not $750,000. A thousand. And the $17.1 million they spent on donor mementos, the Democrats spent $1.5 million.

“Democrats know where to put the money. It’s not giving donors gifts. Donors shouldn’t want gifts. If you give money, give money. You don’t need the fancy pin to put on your lapel.”

Following her loss, Dhillon warned her party that it must listen to the base, saying, “if we ignore this message, I think it’s at our peril. It’s at our peril personally, as party leaders and it’s at our peril for our party in general.”

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