(Mark Hammermeister)

Two weeks ago, Phil Mushnick, a respected veteran sports writer for The New York Post, published a column about the Brooklyn Nets’ new brand identity, as designed with the help of Jay-Z. The team—previously known as the New Jersey Nets—had switched their colors to black and white. “Why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?” Mr. Mushnick suggested, referring to the team’s part-owner. “Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N------s. The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B---hes or Hoes ...”

Once upon a time, a remark like that would have led to a call for Mr. Mushnick’s head ... or at least a resignation. And while several media outlets picked up on the story on their Web sites, the “scandal” was a non-starter. Mr. Mushnick was not reprimanded by The Post. Forbes even defended him.

If the story of Mr. Mushnick seemed novel, though, it was only because it didn’t happen on Twitter. At times, it seems as if the microblogging platform was designed to ease the glide path of users’ feet directly into their mouths as they dash off unthinking, offensive commentary: Cee Lo Green calling a fan of The Voice ‘gay’; CNN commentator Roland Martin’s homophobic tweets after the Super Bowl; Chris Brown being Chris Brown (his response to a hater: “Grow up n——a!!! Dick in da ass lil boy.”)

Ashton Kutcher's "brownface" PopChip commercial

Nearly four years after the election of a black man as president, intolerant attitudes are having a cultural moment. And one inspiration may well be Mr. Obama himself, whose occupation of the White House seems to have been misinterpreted as a signal that the country has overcome the ugliness of its racist past and we are now all free (at last) to air our most contemptible prejudices.

Of course, not all racists, sexists, anti-Semites and homophobes are created equal. There’s the bilious misogyny of a Rush Limbaugh and the unhinged anti-Semitism of a John Galliano or a Mel Gibson or a Delmon Young. There’s the mass-stupidity of all of those Hunger Games fans outraged by the casting of an African-American actor as a character they thought was white and the semi-ironic, "hipster racism" displayed by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the HBO show Girls.

The latter form was dubbed “ironic racism” after Ms. Arfin responded on Twitter to criticisms that the show didn’t feature enough women of color, cracking, “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”

The tweet, quickly deleted, spurred bloggers to uncover other damning evidence of Ms. Arfin’s racist attitudes—including a 2007 interview on the Huffington Post, in which she noted the n-word “was a great word. It packs so much punch.” (To give more context, Ms. Arfin was asked to pick between three 'hate' terms as her favorite.) Gavin McInnes, Ms. Arfin’s former employer at VICE, jumped to her defense—not that he’s an especially respected authority on tolerance.

It seems that with the rigid speak-no-evil precepts of political correctness now as out of fashion as stonewashed jeans, the rules have become a little fuzzy. It’s interesting to see just what sort of parochialism is forgiven and what is not. The hit Comedy Central series Tosh.0 includes a segment called “Is It Racist?” that is itself, arguably, racist (it’s definitely stupid). Meanwhile, ESPN employee Anthony Federico was fired for headlining a story about Jeremy Lin “A Chink in the Armor,” though he later claimed the implication was inadvertent. There was Ashton Kutcher’s controversial “brown face” ad for PopChips and Jon Hamm’s not-that-controversial blackface in a special episode of 30 Rock.

It seemed an auspicious time for lunch with Taki Theodoracopulos, the charismatic 75-year-old Greek socialite, pundit and founder of The American Conservative, who has been making racist remarks—and getting away with it—for decades now. Despite a reputation for venomous rhetoric, his byline has graced the pages of Hamptons Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Press, The Spectator, The Sunday Times, Esquire and Newsweek.

More recently, Mr. Theodoracopulos has been writing mostly for his own Web site, Taki’s Magazine. While the site bears the tagline: “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar,” it is perhaps better known for a collection of race-baiting essays and blog posts by a rogue’s gallery of politically incorrect luminaries, including Pat Buchanan, Mr. McInnes and Redneck Manifesto author Jim Goad. In early April, the site posted an essay by John Derbyshire called “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” about what children should know about African-Americans (“Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally ... Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods”). Mr. Derbyshire was also a contributor to National Review, but not for long. The Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, quickly cut him loose, writing that the post “constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

Mr. Derbyshire quickly retreated from the public stage, and the news that he was undergoing chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia may have even garnered him some sympathy points. But just a month later, Mr. Derbyshire landed a new gig on VDare.com, an anti-immigration site. His first article extolled the virtues of white supremacy.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t surprised by the development. “More often than not, real racism lies right below the surface, and what holds it back is fear of criticism or fear of losing one’s career,” he said, noting that the center considers VDare a hate site.

Such outspoken racism is increasing, he said. “At a macro-level, what we’re seeing is a lot of white people feeling like they are losing their country ... that after Obama’s election, they’re drowning in a tide of color.”

The ethos of Taki's Mag (TakiMag.com)

Naturally, Mr. Derbyshire is still writing for Taki, who a few weeks after the notorious blog post was sitting in the Midtown restaurant Cognac, spooning up pink lobster bisque and chasing it with two large glasses of pinot grigio. Between bites, Mr. Theodoracopulos gossiped about his time working for—where else?—The New York Observer.

“I called A.M. Rosenthal from The New York Times ‘Abie,’ and his wife thought that was anti-Semitic,” he recalled in his languidly aristocratic accent. “How is that anti-Semitic?”

A genial man in a dapper blue suit and sparkling cuff links, Mr. Theodoracopulos bore a strong resemblance to Anthony Hopkins. He remembered being called into the office of then-owner Arthur Carter after Mr. Rosenthal’s wife, Shirley Lord, called to complain.

“Arthur would say ‘What is the problem, Taki?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos laughed. “I’d tell him, ‘The problem is that I’ve run out of shoe polish, Arthur. Would you mind if I took some from your hair?’”

He smiled.

“You get it?” Mr. Theodoracopulos asked. “Because his hair always looked like he rubbed it with shoe polish!”
When Fraser Nelson took over as editor of the Spectator, where Taki contributed a regular column, he jokingly told the columnist he would be fired. “He said, ‘No one is complaining about you anymore, Taki, so why are we paying you?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos recalled, snickering like a man who was having the last laugh. And perhaps he is.

In his inaugural editor’s “diary,” Mr. Nelson noted a change in the air. “It’s not that Taki is conforming to the world,” he wrote. “The world, I think, is finally conforming to him.”

Racial resentment seems especially uncharitable coming from someone like Mr. Theodoracopulos, a jet-setting playboy of good standing. His father, in addition to being an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, was a shipping baron. His grandfather, Panagiotis Poulitsas, was briefly the prime minister of Greece. After a career as a professional tennis player, and a short stint working in his father’s offices, Taki was recruited by Arnaud de Borchgrave, then senior editor of Newsweek, to go to Vietnam as a photographer.

“I didn’t want to work for my father, I didn’t want to be a shipper, or a tycoon’s son,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said of his beginnings in journalism.

He’s been married twice, currently to his wife of 31 years, Princess Alexandra Carlota Sophy von Schoenburg-Hartenstein, and has two children, “who have never disappointed me,” he said. His son, J.T., is a bike messenger; his daughter, Mandolyna, runs Taki’s Magazine. “She is actually the brains behind the site, because I don’t really read the Internet,” Mr. Theodoracopulos told us proudly.

The idea for the Web site came about after Mr. Theodoracopulos ceased his involvement with The American Conservative in 2007.

“At a certain time, I had to take a step back and say ‘Do I want to keep giving millions of dollars to magazines that no one reads, or something else?’” he recalled. Mandolyna, who spent the ’90s working for publications like Hamptons Magazine and, yes, The New York Observer (as a fact-checker under Graydon Carter, who not only hired her father for his original tenure at the Observer, but who went on to employ both father and daughter at Vanity Fair), then took off a decade to work as an interior designer before returning to journalism.

“I made peace with my dad years ago,” the London-based Ms. Theodoracopulos told us over the phone. “It’s really nice to have a family business.”

The only area where she and her father disagree, she told us, was the Middle East. (“I’m not saying Israel shouldn’t exist,” he said, “but they need to give back the occupied territories.”)

“Be nice to my dad,” Ms. Theodoracopulos warned before hanging up. “He’s one of the nicest, sweetest men you’ll ever meet.”

Taki Theodoracopulos with Arianna Huffington (Patrick McMullan)

MR. THEODORACOPULOS can be charming in person, which might explain how he’s been able to maintain some of his social cachet despite his disreputable opinions. Though he credits William Buckley at the National Review with giving him his first job, it wasn’t until he started his High Life social column in The Spectator that he found his niche. “I was a natural,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said. “People couldn’t believe what I wrote in High Life, but I didn’t care about access, I already had access. I knew what was going on. You have to get your foot in the door writing what you know about, and this was what I knew.”

That particular beat has shrunk with time. “Society doesn’t exist anymore ... or if it does, it doesn’t go out,” Taki sniffed. He is ditching his London home because, he explained, the city is “becoming overcrowded with Arabs.” He is more often found in his apartment on East 71st Street and is plotting a sailing trip to Cannes, where, he said, he will be shooting a movie with Norman Mailer’s son Michael.

During lunch, Mr. Theodoracopulos employed a number of epithets for various ethnic and racial groups. The n-word rolled off his tongue. He was unapologetic about his use of such terms, and made us uncomfortably complicit by leaning in conspiratorially and smiling while saying some of the more horrific things we’ve ever heard outside of a Quentin Tarantino film. He expressed disgust for professional athletes: “They have 12 kids and beat up on their wives, and she can’t go to court because she’s black and doesn’t have an education.” He praised Robert E. Lee and condemned Abraham Lincoln as “a murdering traitor.” He chuckled as he told us the story of a controversial Sunday Times editorial he once wrote: “I said that I thought I saw a gorilla once at Wimbleton. It was Venus Williams.”

Asked if he considered himself racist, Mr. Theodoracopulos shrugged. “It was very bad taste, but blacks make fun of us, why can’t we make fun of them?”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Theodoracopulos’s mouth has gotten him into trouble over the years. “In this country, there are tremendous libel suits ... I’ve lost five libel cases myself,” he told us proudly. “Not four. Five.”
He sat serenely while we probed him about his xenophobia, then worked himself into a lather about the Saudis. “They are the ones who finance all the terror,” he said. “They eat their own shit. And we’re supposed to call them royals? These are not royal families ... I call them ‘ruling towelheads.’”

But even as he flaunted his most noxious opinions, Mr. Theodoracopulos was oddly eager to clear the record on at least one charge against him. Asked about an article in which he referred to himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite,” he bristled.

“No! Everyone gets that quote wrong, because they don’t speak French. Soi-disant means ‘so-called.’ I am saying that everyone else calls me an anti-Semite!”

As in most matters, his opinion on this differs from that of the media. As The Guardian wrote, in fact, the term is generally translated as “self-styled.” Mr. Theodoracopulos indignantly told us that he had spoken French for most of his life and knew better than journalists what the translation was.

As if to prove that he had nothing against Jews, he continued, “All my WASP friends in America say, ‘What happened to our money, Taki?’ And I tell them, ‘You drank it all away, and the Jews and n---ers were able to get it.”

It seemed like a good time to mention we were Jewish.

“And you don’t drink a lot, do you?” Mr. Theodoracopulos replied with a smile. “You can’t ever say that the Jews are drunks. The WASPS are drunks.”

With that, the Greek socialite motioned for the waiter and ordered us a second glass of white wine. As it turned out, Mr. Theodoracopulos was right about one thing: we spent the rest of the day nursing a massive headache.

Phil Mushnick, big racist (Getty Images)

Phil Mushnick is a man that once garnered the nickname "Mr. Grumpy" from his boss at Fox Sports. That was in 1998, when it was known even then that Mr. Mushnick was a relic. "He’s a throwback," David Hill, president of Fox Sports told The New York Observer at the time. "He sees himself as a knight in shining armor protecting sports fans from the slings and arrows hurled at them by cretinous, unfeeling network sports chiefs.”

But cretinous is a term that applies more to Mr. Mushnick more than sports chiefs, especially after today's rant about Brooklyn Nets, during which he refers to the players as N------, which is certainly a novel way to say the N-word without saying the N-word, but otherwise is a pretty indefensible position all around. Even better is that Mr. Mushnick then tried to defend his statements by blaming the Nets' part-owner, Jay-Z.

From this morning's column:
As long as the Nets are allowing Jay-Z to call their marketing shots — what a shock that he chose black and white as the new team colors to stress, as the Nets explained, their new “urban” home — why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?

Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N------s? The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B----hes or Hoes. Team logo? A 9 mm with hollow-tip shell casings strewn beneath. Wanna be Jay-Z hip? Then go all the way!

When called out by New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, and hilariously on Buzzfeed, Mr. Mushnick became super defensive, whining to Bob's Blitz:

Such obvious, wishful and ignorant mischaracterizations of what I write are common. I don't call black men the N-word; I don't regard young women as bitches and whores; I don't glorify the use of assault weapons and drugs. Jay-Z, on the other hand.....Is he the only NBA owner allowed to call black men N---ers?"

Jay-Z profits from the worst and most sustaining self-enslaving stereotypes of black-American culture and I'M the racist? Some truths, I guess, are just hard to read, let alone think about.

(Same column I provide support for Amar'e Stoudemire at a time when everyone in town is ripping him to shreds. That was my LEAD, too, but what does that matter?)

He then copy-and-pasted a similar response to The Village Voice, saying:

James - did you actually read what I wrote and what I've been writing for 30 years? I don't call black men niggas; my kids never heard the word until folks such as Jay-Z came along. I'd suggest you talk to him about it. What I wrote today was on Jay Z's artistry, and only the wishful and foolish would so badly misinterpret and mischaracterize it as you plan to do. Thanks - mushnick

This is a clever way to play President Obama's foreign-policy tour of Europe, since it gives Mr. Obama little in the way of credit for any of the actual policy. It's a reminder that not so long ago Europe was not our biggest fan. But a lot of New York readers, given the choice of liking or lumping that fact, chose to lump it. Screw Europe! Is President Obama delivering on a campaign promise to restore America's good name with its longtime allies? Is he pandering to wimpy Hague bureaucrats and Surrender Monkeys who eat funny yogurt and wear gold chains under their dress shirts? The News reports: you decide.

Inside are some great quotes: "We now see a completely different approach, and this suits me," said Mr. Medvedev. Nicolas Sarkozy, who is prettier and tabloidier and less insane than Messrs. Medvedev and Berlusconi, probably didn't qualify for the cover since he had threatened to walk out if the president pushed a European version of a stimulus package. Mr. Sarkozy found him to be "a very open man, very open-minded, entirely in line with what we want—namely that politicians shoulder their responsibilities and face up to them." Oh, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked Mr. Obama for an autograph, for his daughter.

But wow, it's a rough day for the tabloids if this is leading the paper today, isn't it? We just had Obama with the Queen yesterday; is this really a running front-page story for a New York tabloid? Can't we find another countess who's getting a divorce over there, or in Connecticut, or something?

Yesterday about 20,000 neighborhood residents and Yankee fans got a peek inside the new Yankee stadium, and a package of stories about the new stadium is flagged on the bottom of the page with a nice pinstripe motif under the words: “Fans go wild for new Yankee Stadium.”

Reporters Oren Yaniv and Corky Siemaszko combed the bleachers and seemed to get  rave reviews from a pretty wide variety of fan at the club. The rest of the package is pictures and solicitious quotes from the players about how awesome the new stadium is. Well, it's baseball season, and it's … exciting? … to have a new stadium, even if the popcorn costs seven bucks.

The New York Post, meanwhile, takes over its entire front page to shill the new stadium to readers. 'HOME RUN,'  the headline declares: “New Yankee Stadium a hit!” The picture shows the backs of four fans in the nosebleed seats—a nice bit of populism—but with the result that, well, you can't really see the field, or the players, or anything else. Both of the tabloids are full of fantastic pictures of the players, who tested out the field yesterday for fans; the architecture, which is to us a little scary and brutal and looks like something from a Fritz Lang movie, but at least is impressive-looking; and lots of candids of fans in the stands who are actually facing the camera. It's a static image, no dynamics or emotion or grandeur. And it is the entire front page! The Post, too, offers lots of images inside and an impressive spread. But that is not what we're here for.

This front-page set-up is made only more baffling by the fact that so much of the material inside the paper tears the new stadium to shreds. To select just one quote from Joel Sherman: "They will tell you they built this stadium for the everyman, stressing what they consider still affordable pricing and amenities. But this stadium, in actuality, was built for a moneyed class that in many respects does not even exist in this city any longer."

And then there is this from Phil Mushnick: "In the 21st century, all of the Mets, Yankees and NYC resources could not duplicate what the Romans did 20 centuries ago. The Roman Coliseum, now 2,000 years old, never had a bad seat."

The bad sightlines from the cheap seats—wait, what's our cover image again?—are apparently really bad: "The Mets' new billion-dollar, state-of-the-art, restaurant- and luxury-box-lined park has loads of obstructed-view seats—same as the Yanks' new park. The Mets are pretending that theirs don't exist, while the Yanks are pretending that theirs were part of the plan, all along." Mr. Mushnick adds, "Who was the architect? George Costanza?"

Sounds like a big hit to us!

Meanwhile, we think it's worth noting that the Post didn't reach for the low-hanging fruit of Obama in Europe for its cover. Remember, these are the people who made a front page photomontage in which the United Nations security council was seated around a table, their heads replaced with the heads of weasels.

General observations: First of all, we'd like to address a question we've gotten from a few readers: Are we employed by Rupert Murdoch? Why does the Post always win this thing? I've posted an answer here, which I hope you'll read; but suffice it to say we're calling them as we see them, and we're not worrying about anything like “balance.” That, we hope, comes through in the analysis. We're being as fair as its possible to be in the midst of a subjective enterprise. And what you are about to read has nothing to do with that reader feedback.

Winner: The Daily News. But do yourself a favor today and spring for The Times. Who doesn't like to start the weekend a day early?

But Mr. Mushnick isn't going. Turns out that the NSSA winners-who this year include Bob Costas and Mr. Mushnick's Post colleague and NBC loudmouth, Peter Vecsey-have their way paid by corporate sponsors, including Nike.

Readers of Mr. Mushnick's column know that the curmudgeonly scribe ha-a-ates Nike. And, true to form, Mr. Mushnick hated the fact that his potentially pleasant sportswriters' weekend was going to be partially paid for by an athletic-wear manufacturer stained by repeated allegations of worker exploitation, not to mention its commercialization of athletics in general.

"It was disappointing to see a journalistic entity have Nike sponsorship, on a personal level-and only on a personal level-because I think a good sportswriter or a good sportscaster should really just be beating the shit out of Nike for how it's bastardized sports," Mr. Mushnick said.

Taking a moral stand isn't always a picnic, however. They have a really sweet golf course down in North Carolina. But when it was made known that Nike would sponsor the golf tournament, Mr. Mushnick Just Couldn't Do It.

"They have a beautiful golf outing at a Salisbury country club," Mr. Mushnick said. "But when I saw that it was Nike, I thought, 'I'm just going to say that I'm busy.'" (Turns out Mr. Mushnick actually is busy; he's got a bar mitzvah to attend.)

Barbara Lockert, the program coordinator at the NSSA, was familiar with Mr. Mushnick's problems with Nike, but it didn't sound like she was ready to scrap the tournament. "Phil has problems with a lot of things," Ms. Lockert said, "but as far as I'm concerned, the only way we can pay for three days of people coming down here is through our sponsors."

In a two-tabloid newspaper war, no slight should go unnoticed. That's why Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has people like Ken Frydman on his payroll.

One night last December, Mr. Frydman, the Daily News publicist, was home watching the WNYW-Fox 5 10 O'Clock News when he noticed that a catchy regular segment entitled the "NY Minute" featured a few seconds of footage from a Daily News–sponsored event. But while the event-a student sing-along entitled "Festival of Voices 2000"-was mentioned, the Daily News wasn't, even though it occurred at the newspaper's headquarters on West 33rd Street. According to Fox, it just happened "in midtown."

Mr. Frydman wondered: Had WNYW Fox 5, which is owned by New York Post publisher Rupert Murdoch, instituted a blackout of all mentions of the Daily News?

Apoplectic, Mr. Frydman called up during that night's broadcast to complain. According to a letter he recently wrote to Fox 5 news director Susan Sullivan, he was told by the night assignment editor, Joe Farrington, that the station had begun "'enforcing a longstanding policy' of either not crediting the Daily News for stories … or simply omitting any mention of the Daily News."

Holy Pravda! Off the Record called Mr. Farrington to see if his recollection of the conversation jibed with Mr. Frydman's version, but we were quickly rushed over to Fox 5 general manager Michael Wach, who said that no policy of blacking out the Daily News exists-and that Mr. Farrington denied ever telling Mr. Frydman that one ever existed.

Of course, you know what happened next. On the following day, Dec. 19, Fox 5 picked up two stories plugged as exclusive in that day's Daily News without giving the paper any credit: a news feature about Donald Trump's legal battle with his nephew, and an investigation into the city's crackdown on illegal loft apartments in Brooklyn.

While the loft story was chased by various city outlets-fueled by some remarks reacting to the News' story at Mayor Giuliani's press conference that day-it looked as if Fox 5 had simply lifted the Daily News reporting on the Trump family squabble without ever saying where they got it.

According to Mr. Frydman, he was told by the TV station that a Daily News credit had been in the original Trump story script but had "fallen off," which Mr. Frydman believes was intentional.

In Fox 5's defense, Mr. Wach said the Daily News is regularly credited on his newscasts-about five times a month, he said-just not in these instances. "I'm not going to get into specifics about who said what and when because it's useless," Mr. Wach said. "We have demonstrated a policy of crediting the Daily News when necessary, as we do with any other media outlet."

Starting March 1, Us Weekly design director Rina Migliaccio will be trading publisher Jann ("Mr. Clean") Wenner's immaculately kept offices for the recently de-moused headquarters of Talk magazine, where she'll take the reins as design director. Ms. Migliaccio, who started at Us when it was still a monthly-ah, those carefree days, when reflective Us staffers could smell the celebrity roses and didn't have to crash breaking stories like they did last week for Tom and Nic's breakup-gave the Wenner title its shiny new look when it went weekly last year.

So is Ms. Migliaccio going to start messing with Talk? A spokesperson for Talk downplayed any major aesthetic changes in the magazine. "There is no redesign. She's here to strengthen what we already have," said the spokesperson, who said that Ms. Migliaccio will work alongside Talk's moonlighting creative consultant, Oliviero Toscani.

One office perk Ms. Migliaccio gets by coming to work for Tina Brown: free magazines! Sources at Wenner Media said that after the company found out it was blowing more than $300,000 on magazine subscriptions, it decided to cancel them all. Staffers now need approval from their bosses-"Sir, mind if we sign up for an annum of Horse & Hound?"-to buy maggies.

"When you have eight years of growth, there's a lot of fat," one Wenner insider said of the subscription rollback. "So we're looking at subscriptions, like any company would do."

Word going around the office is that the most popular subscription at Wenner was Men's Health, a stiff competitor to Wenner's Men's Journal.

David Zinczenko, Men's Health's editor in chief, was thrilled to hear the news on a recent night at Lotus, where the Emmaus, Pa.–based magazine was celebrating its fashion issue. "If they [Wenner Media] cancel all their subscriptions to Men's Health, where are they going to get all their ideas from?" Mr. Zinczenko asked.

Yo, yo, Pinch-Dogg! Check it, son! If nothing else, the theatrical trial of Sean (Puffy) Combs is proving to be an opportunity for The New York Times to give its well-mannered readership a badly needed Berlitz class in hip-hop terminology.

Primary teaching duties go to Times reporter Katherine Finkelstein, who thus far has informed the paper's readers that inside the hip-hop world Mr. Combs and his associates inhabit, unloading a handgun is called "busting off," wealth is known as "bling bling," "two pulls" on a marijuana cigarette constitute two puffs, and diamonds are known as "ice."

Also thanks to Puffy, Times readers who typically get their swerve on with Paul Krugman or the Saturday Arts & Ideas section learned that refusing to smack Mr. Combs five in a hip-hop nightclub may be enough to provoke trouble; that a fight may occur when someone throws a wad of cash in someone else's face; and that a large man may be described as "Ray Lewis, two levels down," in a reference to the Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis.

Whether any of this surfaces in William Safire's Sunday "On Language" column, of course, is anyone's guess. But mad props to Ms. Finkelstein and the rest of her N.Y.T. posse.

Phil Mushnick, the New York Post 's sports TV columnist and roving moralist, was on the phone one recent evening in the basement office of his home in Old Bridge, N.J., talking sports.

With Mr. Mushnick, talking sports means talking life, and at this particular moment he was talking about his own. In fact, he was addressing the central contradiction therein: He is the sports world's self-appointed watchdog, sniffing out greed, hypocrisy and bad taste in both his thrice-a-week Post column and his weekly TV Guide column, condemning corporate bullying, shoddy journalism, eroding sportsmanship and bad camera angles. But who is the master who fills his bowl? None other than Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the Post and TV Guide , the big bad wolf of Fox Sports and, in the eyes of many, no friend of journalism, sports or tasteful TV.

It is the kind of apparent conflict of interest that could, in the hands of Mr. Mushnick, make for some tart columns questioning whether the great arbiter is guilty of pulling his punches.

"I've had some stuff that I wanted to pursue that was, shall we say, looked at sideways," Mr. Mushnick admitted. "There weren't active pressures. But there were subtle pressures, early in the life of Fox Sports-'Oh yes, mate, you're the fellow who ripped Fox'- but they have completely disappeared."

Every year, a few weeks before Christmas, Mr. Murdoch invites a handful of Post staff members to have lunch with him in a conference room in the News Corporation building in midtown Manhattan. Last December, Mr. Murdoch chose about a dozen to dine with him on meager portions of fish, among them Ken Chandler, Fred Dicker, Richard Johnson and Mr. Mushnick. At one point, after extolling the prospects of 20th Century Fox's (and therefore his) Titanic , Mr. Murdoch asked his charges how they might improve the paper.

"Stop cluttering it up with ads!" Mr. Mushnick volunteered. Mr. Murdoch smiled. The man does have a sense of humor.

Still, Mr. Mushnick has done his best over the years to cleanse the pages of the Post -or at least his page-of both corporate self-promotion and advertising. He has not refrained from hammering Fox Sports and some of the Post 's own advertisers in the space Mr. Murdoch pays him to fill.

"I go after Fox all the time," he said over the phone. "I like to think that the next time Ted Kennedy hauls [News Corporation executives] into a Senate subcommittee on cross-ownership in a major market, that line of questioning would end when someone pointed out: 'Here, look what Mushnick just wrote about [Fox football commentator] John Madden, who just happens to be the highest-paid employee in the Murdoch realm. He trashed the guy.'"

From Jock to Crusader

Since he started writing about television and radio 16 years ago, Mr. Mushnick, 45, has taken up crusades ranging from cable companies' gouging of customers to the use of meaningless statistics in football broadcasts. Ten years ago, he was the first to make noise about Nike's exploitation of inner-city kids and Nike pitchman Michael Jordan's complicity in it. He was also among the first to criticize the networks and Major League Baseball for broadcasting World Series games so late at night that no child east of the Mississippi could ever hope to watch past the seventh-inning stretch.

At first, Mr. Mushnick was considered a little nuts. But over time, his pet causes have been integrated into the national polemic over the degraded state of sports. He may not be the Last Angry Man. But for a time he was the loneliest, and he remains extremely hard to please.

"I call him Mr. Grumpy," said David Hill, president of Fox Sports. "He's a throwback. He sees himself as a knight in shining armor protecting sports fans from the slings and arrows hurled at them by cretinous, unfeeling network sports chiefs."

"People are afraid of him in the sports business," said Seth Abraham, president of Time Warner Sports. "He's the Thomas Nast of the industry." Nast, of course, was the cartoonist whose caricatures of corrupt Tammany Hall officials helped bring down the Tweed Ring in the early 1870's. But whatever Boss Tweed and his cronies hauled in from the public treasury, it was chicken feed compared to the multibillion-dollar media pigout that the modern sports business has become, with its tangled webs of ownership and its legions of potentially conflicted employees. Companies like News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner own teams, networks, news outlets and delivery systems, and therefore murk up the issue of who's covering whom, how and why. Sports journalism may not be a high priority among those who fret about a media universe dominated by a few corporate behemoths, but Mr. Mushnick believes it is a tradition worth fighting for and shouting about.

"The unique thing about Mushnick is that he makes shit happen. It may take 10 years, but eventually people listen," said one network executive. "The most often used expression among network publicists is 'Did you see Mushnick today?'"

Everyone sees his column, but not everyone heeds it.

"I have been involved in meetings where people have said, 'Mushnick will kill us on that,' but that fact has not really influenced whatever decision was being made," said a sports executive. "I'm not sure he hasn't lost some of his influence because he's always in such a rage. He reminds you of the guy whose face is always red, who's always screaming, so you just tune him out."

And you don't return his calls. Mr. Mushnick's trashing of NBC's coverage of the National Basketball Association and the Atlanta Olympics earned him the lasting enmity of NBC sports president Dick Ebersol. Mr. Mushnick has not spoken to Mr. Ebersol since the Atlanta Games ended in 1996. But Mr. Mushnick won't allow the occasional missed scoop to get in the way of a good rant. "How locked out can you get?" he said. "They're still on the air."

Staten Island Nostalgist

Mr. Mushnick's penchant for nostalgia might be attributed to a childhood spent on Staten Island in the green, pure days before the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge linked the borough to Babylon. He was a sports fanatic early on. He served as a water boy who kept tackle charts for the Wagner College football team, which brought him his first brush with stardom. Former Jet head coach Rich Kotite, then Wagner's star tight end, once loaned him a windbreaker during a game. Now there was a true sportsman.

Mr. Mushnick left Eden to attend Waynesburg College in southwestern Pennsylvania, where he cultivated a fondness for eccentric jocks and Quaaludes. Then, after graduating in 1973, he got a job as copy clerk at the Post , the only newspaper that would hire him. With the exception of a short stint at Newsday , he has been at the Post ever since.

His disillusionment with the sports world came early. He covered the New York Rangers in the late 1970's and was assaulted by hockey hero Phil Esposito inside the locker room in response to a critical piece. Before that, Mr. Mushnick recalled, Mr. Esposito "told me not to stir up any crap. He told me that the guy I'd replaced was a homosexual. Then he told the guy who replaced me that I was a homosexual. That was the year I became an Islanders fan."

In 1983, he gave up the beat life for good. He took over an insignificant TV notes column, moved it to the sports page and gradually turned it into the wide-ranging consumer-watchdog soapbox it is now.

Harvey Araton, a sports columnist for The New York Times , grew up with Mr. Mushnick on Staten Island and worked with him at the Post . "When Phil began to distance himself from the mainstream of sports, as he grew angrier and angrier in his column, he really began to value the legacy of Dick Young," Mr. Araton said, referring to the late, legendary sports columnist. "Dick Young was great for his day, but Phil is far more enlightened than Dick Young could ever have imagined being." Young wrote a column called Clubhouse Confidential, which was the ultimate notes column. "Basically, it was all about baseball and boxing," Mr. Araton said. "But today's sports world is so much more diverse. In the 80's, after Young died, the Post and the News tried to replicate that Clubhouse Confidential format. But nobody could do it. The truth was, the TV sports column was now the ultimate notes column, because television ran sports. If you were plugged into the TV sports executives, you were plugged into every sports league."

Every paper, of course, has its TV sports columnist now. But none brings the passion or wide-ranging outrage to their coverage that Mr. Mushnick does. Other prominent sports columnists, like Mike Lupica of the Daily News , get to denounce the knaves from time to time, but they have to spend a great deal of their time plying the access trade and covering the actual games and athletes. They belong to the scene. And they get to pontificate on television.

Like political commentators, many sports columnists yearn for a regular television gig, which gives them a heightened sense of their own power and a brand name to trade on. One reason Mr. Mushnick is not as well known as Mr. Lupica is Mr. Mushnick's refusal to go on television. Mr. Hill offered him a spot on a new Fox Sports Net talk show, but in the name of maintaining critical distance and journalistic integrity, he declined.

It might also explain why Mr. Mushnick occasionally suffers slings and arrows from the boys wearing the pancake makeup. He's not one of theirs.

High and Mighty, Eh?

"I like Phil," said Dick Schaap, veteran sportswriter and a commentator for ABC and ESPN who hosts The Sports Reporters , a TV talk show. "Generally speaking, I share his instincts, even when he criticizes me. The thing I don't like is, I hate the newspaper he's in. Anybody preaching journalism within those pages is tainted. As eloquent a statement as Mushnick can make on behalf of journalism, your statement is diminished when you accept a check from Rupert Murdoch … I don't think it's effective to scream at the devil when he's standing right behind you."

"I'm glad Dick said this," Mr. Mushnick replied. "I understand what he's saying. But what does Dick Schaap do when ESPN Sports Center comes on one day, and there's a lengthy feature about an obscure yacht race between California and Hawaii, and it just so happens that the winning boat is owned by Roy Disney? [ESPN is part of the Disney empire.] That was on last summer! If Dick doesn't want to be attached to bad journalism, I would suggest he resign from ABC and ESPN."

Even without a television presence, Mr. Mushnick believes he's had some influence on the state of sports as we know it.

"I really don't want to sound self-absorbed," he said, "but sometimes, in moments of privacy, I'll be sitting at a red light, and for an instant I'll say to myself, 'You know, you're doing a pretty good fucking job. You really are. You've got some dignity. You've stayed clean in a business where you can get pretty dirty pretty friggin' fast.' And I'll say, 'You know, you got this changed and that changed: The way they shoot tennis now is different because you got on CBS all those years for those switch-cuts in the middle of points. You got NBC to put their graphic in the top right and left during golf broadcasts so that it doesn't cover up the ball. You've raised issues, from Nike to starting times to ticket prices and things' … But I swear to you: That stuff is fleeting."

It is fleeting, yes, and perhaps, in the relative scheme of things, insignificant. The transformation of sport from pastime to programming rolls on, heedless of the purists, the nostalgia-mongers and, in Mr. Mushnick's view, the children.

"I coached an 11-year-old girls' basketball team last year, and they went 0-12," he said. "But the good news is that they're all graduating. They all entered junior high school. So I sleep well at night."

You do what you can.