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CATHY HUGHES VS. STEVE HARVEY: Radio One founder fires back at former employee who dissed her at the BET Comedy Awards.
'Steve was still working the chitlin' circuit when we embraced him!' -- Cathy Hughes
*“I think Steve Harvey is probably one of the most disrespectful, ungrateful individuals I’ve ever in my life come across,” said Cathy Hughes, founder of Radio One Inc., which employed the comedian as a morning show host on its Los Angeles affiliate KKBT The Beat.
Harvey stepped down from the show last May and recently joined the Clear Channel family as host of his new nationally-syndicated “The Steve Harvey Morning Show,” apparently leaving behind a slew of choice words against his former station and its owner.
“He was the highest paid air personality on a one-market basis in the industry,” Hughes told EUR’s Lee Bailey Monday during Radio One’s 25th anniversary gala at Windows restaurant over looking downtown Los Angeles. “Radio One paid him more than Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, any of them, on a one-market basis, and he has been so disrespectful.”
Hughes says that she was sitting in the audience of the recent BET Comedy Awards in Hollywood when Harvey told the crowd that "The Beat and Radio One could kiss his whole ass."
“I’m a 60-year-old woman. How dare he be disrespectful to an elder,” Hughes said in a measured tone. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am because I really like him and I really respect him. But false pride goes before the fall, so I’m certain that God will cause him to have to answer for the unkind lies that he’s telling about Radio One. The things that he’s saying are just absolutely, positively ridiculous.”
“It saddens me because this was a brother that we really helped get established – financially and his popularity,” Hughes added. “Steve was still working the chitlin circuit when we embraced him.”
Harvey’s run on The Beat began in 2000, when the comedian’s WB sitcom “The Steve Harvey Show” was in the fourth year of its six-year run. He had also just wrapped six years of hosting the syndicated “It’s Showtime at the Apollo” variety series. Harvey’s first film role, 2003’s “The Fighting Temptations,” came three years into the King of Comedy’s gig on The Beat.
Alas, Steve Harvey is just one chapter in the 25-year history of Radio One, and Hughes says her media empire still has a long way to go.
“We’re still very much a work in progress,” she says of her company launched on Oct. 3, 1980, with the acquisition of WOL-AM in Washington D.C. “We’re growing our cable network [TV One], we’re the fastest growing cable channel in the history of the cable industry. We’re almost up to 30 million households; we’re not two years old yet. We just bought a new radio station in St. Louis and we’re trying to get into the New York market and the Chicago market now.”
She dismisses rumors that her company is in the process of buying New York’s WBLS from Inner City Broadcasting.
“I doubt if 'BLS will ever sell,” she said. “It’s not even a deal in the works. It’s not true.”
Radio One Inc. currently has 13 million weekly listeners tuned to 70 stations in 22 markets from coast to coast. Hughes says the year-long 25th anniversary celebration will wrap with a star-studded gala celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC that “will tell the story of Radio One through music.”
The event, scheduled for Aug. 2006, brings the final celebration back to DC where it all began. The show will be taped for broadcast later on TV One.
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