ALEX BUCKNAM
Asst. News Editor
The American Democracy Project (ADP) hosts this year’s Constitution Day with keynote speaker, Bob McCarthy from WKBW-TV in Buffalo.
McCarthy is currently a political analyst who works for WKBW-TV in Buffalo. He visited Fredonia to talk about the freedom of the press.
McCarthy gave a speech filled with insightful knowledge on how politicians cannot escape the press and how important the press is.
“Politicians couldn’t escape us. They had to answer our questions, and if they didn’t, you would put that in your story, which could be worse,” McCarthy said.
This isn’t the first time McCarthy has been to Fredonia. He has visited Fredonia six times in the past eight years. McCarthy has always loved coming to Fredonia and loves seeing Fredonia’s communications department.
“You guys really have an amazing communication [sic] program here,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy started his journalism career at St. Bonaventure University with no idea what he wanted to do with his life.
“I really didn’t even know what I was going to do when I started there, but I knew that I was never going to be a nuclear physicist [or] anything to do with numbers,” said McCarthy. “I knew how to put some nouns and verbs and semicolons and commas together, and so, [I thought that] maybe I could make a living doing that somehow.”
It took McCarthy about a year and a half before he got into the communications department at St. Bonaventure. He then started to work for the campus newspaper, The Bona Venture, and the campus radio station, WSBU.
During his time at The Bona Venture and WSBU, he was able to get an early head start on his political journalism career and had a Sunday column called “The Politics.”
McCarthy would write about a new subject every week and he would never run out of ideas.
“I was never at a loss for a subject to write about politics and I had the freedom to write in a column format, more than just the what, why, when, where, of [a] structured news story,” McCarthy said.
“The Politics” was important to McCarthy: “I had a lot more freedom and I would have a lot more fun, sometimes I’[d] do crazy things and so I was able to kind of get what I was thinking across to people, but that’s what I enjoyed the most.”
Even to this day, he still recalls and misses his column.
“I’ve been at [WKBW] for a little over a year and I’ve run into various situations where I’ve said to people, ‘I wish I still had my column, because I could address this a lot better,’” McCarthy said.
After graduating college, McCarthy went on to work for the Olean Times Herald and stayed there for six years.
“I was able to build connections at Bonaventure where I was able to talk to the Olean Times Herald[’s] managing editor and was able to land a job right out of college,” he said.
After McCarthy was done writing for the Olean Times Herald, he moved on to do evenings at The Buffalo News, where he has stayed for the past 41 years.
One of his most notable stories was when he exposed wrongdoings committed by the State Liquor Authority and subsequently made the chairman resign. “[Once I found] a bunch of problems in the State Liquor Authority, a bunch of crooked stuff that was going on there, [which caused] the chairman to resign. [This] was part of a team effort on a lot of different things,” McCarthy stated.
McCarthy has won awards for his achievements at The Buffalo News; the most notable one was a statewide Publishers Association first-place prize for articles he and his colleague wrote about the nuclear industry. Bob McCarthy was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a 2002 series of articles co-authored with Mr. Beebe on how State Supreme Court candidates are chosen.
