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Howie Carr (born 1952) is an American broadcaster and journalist, and the number one drive-time talk-radio host in the greater Boston area and New England.

Carr is a native of Portland, Maine, a graduate of Deerfield Academy and of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He now lives in Wellesley, and is married, with five daughters.

Aside from broadcasting, he is an award-winning front-page columnist for the Boston Herald. Known for his scathing exposes of local politicians, he has raised lots of eyebrows and voices over the years. His opinion is valued by the many television stations on which he's regularly featured. The day after President Clinton testified, C-SPAN broadcast Howie's entire show.

As well as being heard on WRKO AM 680 he is syndicated across the country, and streamed on-line through his website. He's interviewed numerous politicians, authors, and celebrities. He has worked as a reporter and commentator for Television stations WGBH & WLVI, both in Boston. In 1980–81, Carr was the Boston City Hall bureau chief of the Boston Herald American, and he later worked as the paper's State House bureau chief. As a political reporter for WNEV, (Now WHDH), his coverage of then mayor, Kevin White, was so relentless that after the mayor announced he wasn't running again, he told the Boston Sunday Globe that one of the things he enjoyed most about his impending retirement was not having Carr chase him around the city.

For years Carr has had an ongoing fued with fomer fellow Herald columnist Mike Barnacle, calling him a "hack" and giving out his home phone number. Barnacle called Carr "a pathetic figure" and asked "Can you imagine being as consumed with envy and jealousy toward me for as long as it has consumed him?"

In 2002, the Herald reported Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy said of a 14-year old rape victim "Tell her to get over it." In the ensuing controversy, a February 20 column by Carr mentioned Murphy's daughters in passing and visitors to Carr's chatroom posted the name of Murphy's hometown and said someone should "rape all of his daughters twice." Murphy and witnesses said he never made those comments in the courtroom and in 2005 Murphy won a $2.09 million libel suit. During the trial Murphy testified after reading Carr's column "I wanted to kill Howie Carr."

In 1985, he won the National Magazine Award, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for Essays and Criticism. In television, he has been nominated for an Emmy Award.

In 1998 Carr starred as himself in the John Travolta film A Civil Action.

The Howie Carr Show

Listeners can call Howie Carr's "chump line" and leave an amusing message which might be played in the third hour of the show each week day . The show also features other contests, like the "Celebrity Death Pool" or the "Wizard of Uhz." In the latter, Carr plays a clip of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy, and the listeners have to guess how many "uh"s the Senator says.

Carr likes to follow the career of mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; he even has a section of his website called "Whitey Watch." He is currently in the process of writing a non-fiction book on the Bulger family and their impact on Massachusetts.

Although Carr equates Massachusetts low-digit license plates with political "hacks", he himself holds passenger plate 9823 as a winner of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles 2004 Low Number Plate Lottery .

External links

• his Web-site
• WRKO
• his Ted Kennedy Web-site
• his Boston Mayor Web-site
• Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles 2004 Low Number Plate Lottery

• 1952 births
• People from Maine
• American journalists