Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Milt Rosenberg, RIP
Media blogger Robert Feder brings the sad news that Milt Rosenberg died Tuesday, and gives the legendary interviewer his due.
“He was a polymath, a perceptive analyst, and a keen questioner,” Morris told friends in an email Wednesday. “These traits, combined with a prodigious memory born of wide reading and experience, made him an outstanding interlocutor of political leaders, business executives, academics, journalists, artists, and others in the long parade of guests whom he welcomed to his studios and to the extraordinary conversations that he then held for the benefit of millions of Americans listening to his program each night in their homes and cars across the nation as streamed by clear-channel radio at 50,000 watts. For four decades his show was the mandatory first stop on the book tour of every author of a serious work of fiction or non-fiction.
“His career was also described by the arc of a moral conversion, carried out in public via his nightly broadcasts, from the ‘soft mindless leftism of an East Coast academic’ to an embrace of free market economics, traditional social values, and an appreciation of the United States as the world’s best hope for the defense of freedom and human decency in global affairs,” Morris wrote.
Born in New York and educated at Brooklyn College and the University of Wisconsin, Rosenberg earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Michigan. He taught at Yale University, the Ohio State University, Dartmouth College, and the Naval War College before joining the University of Chicago, where he served as director of the doctoral program in social and organizational psychology. He later became professor emeritus.
Mr. Rosenberg’s podcast was part of the Ricochet network. He will be missed.
Published in Journalism
92 is a fairly good run, though.
BDE. So sad. I always loved his interview style. Very much the gentleman, drawing out his guests. He seemed not to have any arrogance or ego about him. He will be missed. Looks like at least some of his old interviews are still available here. I’d highly recommend them to anyone who hasn’t heard him.
Thanks for passing along the sad news.
Very sorry to hear this. We were friends. I last had dinner with him over Labor Day.
The top picture is a copy of a copy. That’s Milt’s wife Marjorie on the left, my wife on our wedding day and Milt. I’m to the far right of Milt in the bottom picture. I appeared on his podcast and his later show.
I hadn’t heard him before listening to him here. His podcast stopped working a year ago, at least for me; maybe I just couldn’t figure out how to get it to play.
Anyway, just wanted to chime in with condolences, and to say that it was one of the best, most interesting and impressive podcasts here.
I’ll add my voice to the choir singing Milt’s praises. Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord and may perpetual light shine upon him.
I was on Milt’s show thrice, and I will have say that I enjoyed it every time. He was a fabulous interviewer and back when people read books he was one of the go-to-guys for what to read. I helped bring him to Ricochet, and I am sorry to see him go.
“He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.”
I discovered his show through Ricochet, and when I did it was amazing! Too bad it was towards the end of his run. The prefect model for a podcast an interesting, informed, host interviewing interesting guests. He will be missed.
I became interested in things I didn’t think would interest me by listening to Milt’s interviews. His was a unique and wonderful mind which will be sorely missed. RIP.
I regret never having met him during my time at Chicago: one of the many regrets of my callow youth.
I met him only because our wives were best friends. I will share a couple of Milt stories if there’s interest.
Yes!
As I wrote here on Ricochet some time ago, I felt smarter every time I listened to his show. I have many of his shows saved on my computer. I’ll continue to listen to them from time to time, but now with more sadness.
Yeah I hadn’t seen Milts podcast on Rico in quite a while, used to really enjoy his show. RIP
I went into a bit of mourning when his show went off the air/ceased podcasting. Now it’s real. RIP.
How can it be over nine years since Milt dared to ruffle the Obama campaign’s feathers by having Stanley Kurtz (and David Freddoso) on his show? How fitting that Milt was an early participant in the assaults on speech that have become so commonplace today.
Oh no. What a loss.
I found him via Ricochet and always found his show to be a very profitable use of my time. Like @jackdunphy I always felt smarter after listening to his show.
What a gentleman and a fine radio man. I loved his podcast while it was on Ricochet and it will be missed. I have always admired men like Milt who find something they love and continue to do it until well into a point of life where other men would have retired.
RIP.
Like many others, I only learned of him here but became a faithful listener until the end – in fact his podcast shows up on my phone as a feed due to my technical deficiencies and I still see his name everyday. My teens still joke about my habit a few years back of saying “I was listening to a podcast from Milt Rosenberg…”. What a great interviewer; we were lucky to be introduced to him.
Aww. I love Milt and miss his show.
Ah, this brings back a memory. I was an election judge in Chicago (Hyde Park) in 1972, not long after the voting age was reduced to 18 by the 26th Amendment.
Chicago used mechanical voting machines back then (#irony, the Daley Machine). After the polls closed, we got to work tallying the votes from the machines. Someone had a radio tuned to a news station. As we were carefully checking our tallies and filling out forms to send to the central authority, the news station reported that the Illinois state’s attorney was sending investigators out to precincts that had not yet reported results. I guess in precincts where the results are foreordained, it doesn’t take too long to tally the votes; no need to do any careful checking.
Nixon won every county in Illinois except one that year, including Cook. I guarantee that our precinct was clean, though it probably went for McGovern.
Milt started his show on WGN when I was still just a kid. I listened to it while waiting for Cubs games. He was a bit of a Leftie, but then (other than a hostility to all things Communist) so was I. In my travels I was usually out of range of the 50,000 watt blowtorch and lost track of him. I caught his show one evening driving home from work, and found he didn’t seem to be drinking the koolaid any more.
Milt was always a perceptive interviewer and a genial host. I miss his presence on the airwaves.
WJC’s first term moved Milt to the right.
Goodbye, Milt and thanks for many entertaining shows. The breadth of his knowledge astounded me.
A typical week of shows for Milt could be: The Beatles, The Peloponnesian War, String Theory, Organic Food and Modern Poetry.
Milt would lead great, informative discussions on each topic. If he was interviewing an author, you could tell that he read the book.
I remember William F. Buckley said that one of his favorite interviewers was “that Jewish guy in Chicago”.
Rest in peace, Milt!
It was truly one of my favourite podcasts here.
Sad to see him go. It was always interesting to listen to his guests clue in to the fact that he was a conservative and not know what to do sometimes.
RIP. Milt’s show was one of my favorite here on Ricochet. Every interview was an education.
Which is ironic, because one of the few things Milt was almost entirely ignorant of was Judaism itself.
I learned a lot about other subjects, though!
He has some great in-depth and knowledgeable shows. They reminded me of some in-depth interviews that I have only encountered on C-SPAN. He talked a lot. Thus, it was a bit difficult to get used to his interview style. Only someone as knowledgeable as him could get away with interviewing in that way. I’ve seen some recent Jordan Peterson interviews where he has used a similar approach, but he’s smart too.
I can’t remember any specific episodes, but they were all good, as long as you liked the topic.
I had wondered what had happened to him. I had hoped that someone would have interviewed him for once.
Are there any interviews where he is being interviewed by someone else?
Rest in Peace.
Loved Milt’s radio show Extension 720 on WGN here in Chicago.
Weird when they dropped the show … as if they had anything better to put on late night radio.
Really appreciated Ricochet adding Milt’s newer (after Extension 720) podcasts to their library.
He couldn’t go on forever, but the fact that he was very capably doing the podcast shows until he was 90 years old is nothing short of astonishing.
RIP