Kirk Minihane recently celebrated his one-year anniversary with Barstool and predictably, this isn’t the first time the former WEEI sports radio host is at odds with his current employer and it likely won’t be the last.
According to Minihane, he’ll continue doing his daily podcast with co-contributors Steve Robinson and Mike Geary, but wants no interaction with any Barstool personnel, including founder Dave Portnoy and CEO Erika Nardini.
Late last month, Minihane also began hosting the 11am hour on Barstool Radio every Wednesday, which he now says he’ll no longer do. At the time, Minihane categorized the new hour as “a pandemic pitch-in,” but the podcast and radio host has no desire to “pitch-in” anymore now that he’s angry with Barstool.
The dispute was caused by Barstool Editor-in-Chief Keith Markovich (Kmarko), who gave a platform to the mysterious internet troll Zonker. Zonker is not affiliated with Barstool, but has long been a thorn in the platform’s side because he owns the domain name Barstool.com. Kmarko posted a piece written by Zonker titled “When Rich White Boys Talk About Race.” The piece, which was quickly removed from Barstool’s website, painted Minihane as discriminatory.
This isn’t the first time The Kirk Minihane Show has had an issue with Kmarko, but the latest incident led them to call for Barstool’s editor to be fired.
Zonker also reportedly contacted advertisers and Barstool’s parent company, Penn National with complaints about Minihane, an occurrence the radio host dealt with during his time at Entercom at the hands of Bob Murchison. The tipping point for Minihane was the below tweet, which accentuated his anger with Kmarko for handing Zonker the platform to berate one of Barstool’s employees.
Minihane has battled depression and other mental health issues for years, with three public bouts since 2018. As recently as this past March, Minihane took a short leave of absence from his Barstool podcast to enter a treatment program.
Minihane noted he’s scheduled to be on vacation from Barstool for the next two weeks, so we won’t immediately know if the podcast host will stand by his decision to drop the Wednesday show on the platform’s SiriusXM channel.
Brandon Contes is a former reporter for BSM, now working for Awful Announcing. You can find him on Twitter @BrandonContes or reach him by email at Brandon.Contes@gmail.com.
The moral of the story: when you work with trash, you get dirty. Minihane knew better, but worked for Portnoy anyway.