Jack McKinney

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Jack McKinney, a longtime reporter and columnist who covered subjects from boxing to opera during his nearly 50-year career with the Philadelphia Daily News, has died. He was 73.

McKinney died Saturday at the home of a friend, 12 days after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Also a former talk-show host, he retired from the paper in 1997.

“I suppose it’s safe to admit now that I idolized McKinney,” Daily News editor Zachary Stalberg said. “I can remember lying in bed, listening to his radio show in the dark. I knew then that I wanted to know things the way he did – intimately, passionately and completely.

McKinney spent months in Northern Ireland during some of the most serious fighting there and counted Bernadette Devlin, the fiery Irish representative in the British Parliament, and Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, among his friends. He also covered the struggles in San Salvador in the early 1980s.

“I’ve always believed in advocacy journalism,” he told the Philadelphia Weekly newspaper in 1997. “I don’t believe anyone is objective in journalism. I think that anyone who claims to be is being hypocritical and downright fraudulent.”

In the 1960s, McKinney was the originator and host of “Night Talk” on WCAU-AM, which reached 36 cities. He also had talk and interview shows on other Philadelphia radio and television stations over the years.

“My father was our biggest hero,” his son Sean McKinney said. “The public knew him as a passionate advocate for the underdog and modern-day renaissance man, and we benefited from all these characteristics.”

McKinney was born in Philadelphia and graduated from St. Joseph’s Prep and Valley Forge Military Academy.

He began his Daily News career under the name of J. Cartin McKinney. The late Dean McCollough, a Daily News editor who hired the 20-year-old ex-insurance salesman with extensive opera expertise in 1953, thought Jack McKinney was too unsophisticated for a music critic and came up with the grander byline.

Soon after McKinney started using his own name and writing sports, he staged a number of stunts, including entering a cage of circus lions with a pith helmet and a whip, jumping out of an airplane, sparring with Sonny Liston and racing cars around a track in suburban Langhorne.

After going a few rounds with Liston, then living in Philadelphia, McKinney wrote, “There was fear in Sonny Liston’s eyes, fear that he was going to kill me.”

In addition to Sean, McKinney is survived by sons Brian, Kevin, Brendan and Bentzi; daughter Maura Elizabeth McKinney Mastro; a brother, George; and eight grandchildren.


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