I will gladly say, non-anonymously, that Larry Mendte was widely considered to be an incredible buffoon long before he ever got to Philadelphia or became embroiled in any scandals. When he was working in Chicago, my friends and I would watch the newscast for which he worked as a reporter because we knew he was a reliable source of entertainment via his inane and sensationalistic reports. (I later learned that this had become a favorite sport across the city.) There was nothing funnier on television at the time than him standing on the Michigan Avenue Bridge draped in his Official Reporter Trenchcoat to report, as if it were a looming disaster, the first snowfall of the season. In Chicago. In November. Great stuff.

He did much worse, though, and regularly. He is, in fact, the very epitome of everything that has, for decades now, been wrong with local TV news. Sadly, I missed Mendte’s three-part (!) report called “Burning Down the House,” wherein he had a suburban fire department torch a house for him to escape from. Supposedly, this was service journalism — informing viewers how to safely exit a burning building. More here: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/scarry-larry/Content?oid=889807

This kind of thing is why Jim Warren, then of the Chicago Tribune, created a regular feature in his column called “Mendte Watch.” Mendte has been excusing himself and deriding his critics like this for many years, without ever really owning up to his clownishness or his lack of respect for either himself or the news business of which he has spent his entire career pretending to be a part.