The “So We Don’t Look Silly” Department

One thing we like to make clear on OMW – if we’re wrong, we’ll correct ourselves and own up to the mistake. In this one, we just don’t want to look silly.

In an earlier item, we intimated that CBS Cleveland classic rocker WNCX/98.5 had removed CBS syndicated morning host David Lee Roth from its website, including the front page and all mentions except from the “Contact Us” page. We speculated that the station had done the same in Howard Stern’s last days.

An Alert Reader pointed out that WNCX, for whatever reason, had NEVER featured Howard Stern on its web page, or in its personality “Rock Jocks” page. Sure enough, we dived into “The Wayback Machine” (aka archive.org), and randomly pulled up pages from WNCX’s website dating back to 2000. Indeed, there’s not a mention or picture of Stern, going back to the earliest page that web archiving server has for the station. None of the archives cover the past two month’s of Roth’s time on 98.5, but based on the history, we’ll assume it’s been the same for Roth.

So, we apologize for latching onto a disappearing web page that never actually disappeared. It’s usually easy to tell if a station “purges” all mentions of a personality from its site, but it appears even in his prime, Stern was never prominently featured on WNCX.com…