I havent had the chance to listen to the interview yet, but I take much of the North bashing with a grain of salt around here. I think the overall hatred of him around here usually tarnishes any solid critique of the man's work.
I hate Mike North as a personality. I think he's basically a racist, ignorant, embarrassment to the human race. So clearly, I am in the "I hate Mike North" club.
I happen to like the way he normally interviews people, he doesn't let anyone off the hook and he stands by his statements. He throws very little "fluff" out there for someone like Pax to answer.
I actually do agree with this. North has no PC filter, and when he interviews people he'll ask things that other people won't. Despite my hatred of North, I do consider him to conduct a good interview because of this fact. It amazes me that anyone would subject themselves to being interviewed by North, but as long as people do and he asks the tough questions his interviews are better for him not having any kind of filter. It makes me wonder if these people don't know what they are lining themselves up for, because I would go on basically any other show on either the score or espn 1000 before doing an interview with North just because of his stance. However, as I stated, his stance does make his interviews worth listening to the majority of the time IMO. I only wish he'd stick to asking the questions and tone down the ranting in order to force the interviewee to answer more.
That being said, my objection to this interview was not that he goes after Paxson, which he does, but that he goes after him for the entire interview about the Joakim Noah suspension that was voted on by the team. If I could interview Paxson for half an hour, and he would talk to me the entire time, and I could ask anything I wanted, my questions about that would have lasted for about 1 minute. I mean, quite frankly, it's just not that interesting or important in the short or long term.
There are so many things I would like to fire at Paxson and have him answer, and the Noah suspension would have been like #100 on the list. I think half the reason Paxson was flustered on this is that North wouldn't let the topic die despite Paxson giving him the answer to his basic question about 5 times.
I also think many people around here are just super tight asses.
I'm sure there are some super tight asses in any group of 1000s of people. I don't think you need to be a super tight ass to not like a guy who's primary job responsibility is to take ridiculously extreme stances in an attempt to gather a strong following among people who agree with those stances and try to grab everyone else to listen to you just to argue. It's a pretty common act with many big name people in both print and radio who do it. I don't care for any of them. I often wonder if North really believes everything he says or if he does it just to get effect.