By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

WEEI radio offers a great sounding board for sports fans in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Many of us utilize this asset in the same way. We listen in the car on our way to and from work. Others might even cheat and listen on-line while working. Point is, the station has become an important conduit of information to sports fans throughout the region.
My favorite moments come when baseball experts Sean McAdam and Lou Merloni sit in on the afternoon “Big Show.” McAdam is simply the best baseball reporter in the region while Merloni played the game and understands what the players are going through, both in Boston and in minor league towns like Pawtucket and Portland.
There are elements of sports talk that scare me. Sometimes one of the talking heads just puts out wrong information. Station director Glenn Ordway committed this crime last week while comparing the relative financial conditions of the Red Sox and Yankees, pointing out several times that the new Yankee Stadium is “a municipal stadium” while Fenway Park is owned by the Red Sox. He kept pounding his point home, as Ordway is prone to do, talking about how much money the city and state of New York put into the construction of the new ballpark.
What Ordway didn’t tell his listeners, and perhaps did not know, is that the Yankees supplied $1.1 billion of their own dollars to help build the stadium. That’s a pretty major chunk of the cost. It is similar to what happened when Patriots owner Bob Kraft funded most of his new Gillette Stadium, leaving the cost of “infrastructure” items like new roads to the state of Massachusetts.
Ordway is a bright man. He has been a major figure in Boston sports radio for three decades and virtually invented the successful format that has made WEEI the most highly-rated sports radio talk show in this country. He is an expert on many subjects. When it comes to complicated issues like stadium costs of an archrival, he’s not an expert, but his words were pretty powerful last week. He sent a few thousand listeners home with just another reason to hate the Yankees. They didn’t even pay for their own ballpark!
What Ordway might have told his listeners is that the Yankees for many years operated without any debt service on their franchise because George Steinbrenner bought the ballclub in 1972 for $10 million. He bought cheap when prices were down, then reaped the benefits of inflation and a winning brand. That proved a huge advantage for Steinbrenner when it came to bidding for free agents against other owners who had gone into debt just to buy their own franchise.
Now the Yankees are worth slightly more than $1 billion. Obviously, the Steinbrenners and their minority partners are now paying plenty of interest on the $1.1 billion they spent to help build the new stadium, which is not drawing as many fans this year and isn’t filling all of its luxury boxes. Tough times could be ahead for the richest franchise in U.S. sports.
Here’s my point. Radio time is fleeting. Listeners tune in and out for a variety of reasons. So when a talking head offers up some wrong information, how does WEEI correct its mistakes? Is there a place on its website for quality control? Or are each of the hosts just throwing out what they believe is true and hoping it sticks to the wall?
That’s the problem with “instant” media. Sometimes there is no time to research the subject.
Newspapers have taken a beating from critics in recent years but nobody can deny that reporters put more time and effort into what they write. A typical story might take hours or even weeks to develop. An editor or two looks over the final product. Questions are often asked. And then the story gets published. And if a newspaper makes a factual error, it will run a correction in the next day’s paper.
Radio hosts assume a terrific responsibility when they come on the air. It’s not a job I could ever do because my mind needs a few hours of editing before it can be trusted.  The first thing out of my mouth isn’t always what I believe. I was reminded of this on Monday afternoon when WEEI’s Michael Felger told his co-host Michael Holley that the late Michael Jackson had his nose operated on so he could “look more white.”
Holley, who is black, sounded incredulous as he listened to his co-host’s analogy.
“Do you mean that if a black man gets a nose job, it’s because he wants to be white?” Holley said (and I am paraphrasing here). “But if a white man gets a nose job, it’s because he wants to look better?”
Holley grew more and more disbelieving as the discussion dragged on. Felger held his ground because that’s good radio. Contrasting opinions make a talk show interesting.
The whole thing brought to mind something today’s generation of kids in our local schools have taught me. They don’t see colors or nationalities. My generation and the one that followed are the ones who still try to separate people by race, or religion. Today’s kids have got it right, for the most part.
Here’s one last WEEI comment I will make. Two weeks ago, I wrote an opinion column just like this one in which I criticized “The Big Show” hosts for stating that Clay Buchholz was “frustrated” in Pawtucket and (my favorite) “needed to shut his mouth and start putting up some numbers.”
The next day, this critique from a small city scribe earned a few comments on WEEI. It was suggested that I was “protecting” Buchholz with my words.
Truth is, I wasn’t protecting the young pitching prospect at all. Buchholz is doing just fine by himself, posting one of the best records in the International League this season. My point was he belongs in the big leagues, and that perhaps John Smoltz was a case of Theo Epstein buying too much insurance on his 2009 policy.
It would be more accurate to say I “understand” why Clay Buchholz is still in Pawtucket. Clay probably does, too.