The Making of a Pundit

When the bombing trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols rolled into town, Cohen convinced Dubroff to let him cover it for the Journal -- and through connections and cajoling, he received commitments from CBS Radio and Channel 2 to let him do the same, even though his broadcasting experience at that point consisted mainly of a handful of impromptu appearances on local TV and radio newscasts. With these agreements in hand, he took a leave of absence from his law firm to cover the courtroom occurrences full-time and wound up with even more opportunities than he'd anticipated. With the explosion of the cable-news industry in the wake of the O.J. Simpson case, networks needed to fill an unprecedented amount of time -- and Cohen, a handy lawyer who knew the case inside and out, was the perfect fellow to help them. As a result, he popped up often on CNN and was eventually hired by Fox News to yak about the Nichols phase of the proceedings.

After Nichols was convicted in early 1998, Cohen feared that his ride was over, and with good reason: Fox News, which was moving in a more histrionic direction, dropped him. But CBS Radio kept him on retainer, as did Channel 2, and when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke, he was back in business. The Clinton-Lewinsky shenanigans kept him going for the better part of a year, and after the impeachment bid fell short, the machinations of the JonBenét Ramsey grand jury picked up the slack. While covering the latter, he appeared a time or two on CBS's The Early Show, which brought him to the attention of CBS's television arm -- and in February 2000, executives decided to bring Cohen into the fold. A few months later, he was on the Elian Gonzalez beat for both CBS radio and TV -- and when the presidential election results in Florida were called into question, Cohen got the call as well. "They sent me thinking it was going to be a couple days," Cohen says, "but it ended up being five weeks." He calls working side by side with CBS's heaviest hitters, including Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer and John Roberts, "an amazing experience. When I was covering the McVeigh trial, I remember thinking, 'I'm never going to be on a bigger story.' But after that was impeachment, and then the election, which was a magnitude different from anything else I'd done."

Clearly, Cohen has come a long way since the days when he was sucking up to barstool-warmers at the Denver Press Club. But he retains a becoming modesty about his rise to the peak of punditry, as well as a respect for viewers and listeners that's all too rare in his profession.

"I'm not old enough or experienced enough to cast myself as a legal expert," he says. "So I try to concentrate on giving people the information and perspective they need to reach their own conclusions. I think people who are going to read my stuff or watch me on TV or listen on the radio are smart enough to make up their own minds."

A death in the family: Radio is a business fueled by gossip, so it's no surprise that after longtime Denver DJ Paxton Mills was found dead in Aspen on June 25 only days after his departure from the high-profile morning show on KOOL 105, speculation ran neck and neck with sorrow. The "Comments and Rumors" section of Rob Hatch's essential Web site, denverradio.net, offers the entire range of reactions, from muted grief to angry accusations, sometimes spilling over into complete irresponsibility.

Granted, some of these responses are understandable. The first reports out of Aspen didn't list a cause of death, leading many to conclude that Mills had committed suicide. (The local coroner later pinned the blame on heart disease.) In addition, the circumstances of Mills's departure from KOOL remain a bit muddy. When interviewed by yours truly on June 21, the day after Mills's final show with partner Rick "The Coach" Marshall, the station's overseer, Infinity Radio Denver vice president and general manager Steve Keeney, complimented the host -- "Paxton is a great talent" -- but explained the split by saying, "We just felt we had to part ways," which implies that Mills might not have come up with the idea of leaving on his own. But in a conversation after Mills's death, Keeney backed away from the earlier comment, which he characterized as unintentionally misleading, and insisted that Mills had "resigned of his own volition, for personal reasons -- and I had every reason to believe he was addressing them until I received the phone call telling me what had happened."

In the end, of course, what matter most are the human dimensions of the story -- not just Mills's death at age 52, but the impact of it on his fans and colleagues. The event serves as a reminder that although radio is a game in many respects, it affects real people in very real ways.