In the wake of the NFL scandals of the last couple weeks, some of the long time and prominent media covering the league have been made slightly uncomfortable by having the light shined on their “coverage” of the league, which in many cases seems to consist of writing what Roger Goodell tells them to write.

Is there now a trust gap with Peter King? – Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing looks at the suspicions people are having of King, especially after his column this week which had a tough headline – It’s Past Time, Commissioner – but then leads off with the following paragraph:

A source with knowledge of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s mindset this week said something Wednesday that is very bad news for the 2014 playing status of Carolina defensive end Greg Hardy: “Roger has determined that he will be a leader in the domestic-violence space.”

So many questions. What exactly is  the domestic-violence space and how does one become a leader in it? A source with knowledge of the mindset? Was it Goodell himself, whispering in Peter’s ear? How can someone have a knowledge of someone else’s mindset?

Dave McKenna of Deadspin also wrote on this – Will The Elite NFL Media Still Be Stooges After The Ray Rice Scandal?

He targets not only King, but Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter as well. These types are not used to being criticized, especially King, who acts ridiculously out of touch and childish when challenged in the least bit.

If he’s feeling the heat, that’s a good thing.

When is Dan Shaughnessy going to feel some heat? Self-plagiarism gets old after a while. When was the last time the man had an original thought?

WEEI beat WBZ-FM in the summer book:

Some might say winning the summer ratings book is like going 4-0 in the NFL preseason, but it’s a start.

The media columns today:

Play-by-play man Allen Bestwick will miss NASCAR duties – Chad Finn has the Rhode Island native getting a bit wistful as ESPN’s run broadcasting NASCAR winds down.

Holy Cross radio voice Bob Fouracre recovered, ready to go – Bill Doyle has the football announcer coming back from colon cancer surgery.

In the actual sports area, we’ve got the Raiders coming to town for the Patriots home opener on Sunday. CBS has the 1:00pm game with Greg Gumbel and Trent Green getting the call. Evan Washburn will be the sideline reporter.

Catch all the coverage at Patriotslinks.com.

The Red Sox season is winding down, but the last week is actually pretty entertaining to watch with the lineup almost exclusively made up of young  and new players like Betts, Bogaerts, Cespedes, Castillo, Middlebrooks, Bradley Jr and Vasquez, as well as the young pitchers. Good experience for them. RedSoxLinks.com

The Bruins have started training camp, and have the first holdouts of the Peter Chiarelli era in Torey Krug and Reilly Smith. Get the latest a BruinsLinks.com.

Published by Bruce Allen

Automattician.

18 thoughts on “Week Wrap – Fat Cat Media Feels A Little Heat”

  1. Very interested in seeing the breakdown of those ratings by show. Guarantee that DCM topped TR. This is the long overdue beginning of the end for TR.

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    1. It may be the end of their dominance, and rightly so, the show has begun to suck (® Tony Mazz), but I doubt they’re going anywhere. They signed new deals not that long ago and like D & C were the last several years, they may be losing to the direct competition but they’re blowing away most of the other shows in that time slot. Stay or go, T & R are definitely in decline to some extent.

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  2. While the likes of Adam Jones, Bertrand and Tony Spazz read the writing on the wall over the weekend and quickly forgot about the demands being made up through last Saturday, Tim Benz is still beating the drums for Roger Goodell to be fired.

    Why? Because Goodell is protecting wife and girlfriend beaters?

    No, because Goodell made Tim and his mediot buddies look and sound even more stupid than they usually do.

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  3. One only needs to hear the advancement of weekend slug Joe Murray (he with the sports knowledge of Mikey Adams, the edginess of Jon Meterparel and the English language command of Wiggy) to see the rise and fall of TSH in the present time. WEEI redux

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  4. I caught the Trent Green obligatory interview on 98.5 this morning. I have not really focused on him when he does a game (has he done a Pats game before?)…but I thought he was funny, knowledgable and pretty self deprecating this morning. If that comes through in the broadcast that will be a good thing.

    Regarding the NFL Media royalty…They got complacent. It happens; look at the Globe, the NYT and the Washington Post. They enjoyed access rather than doing their job. Fear of making enemies outweighed doing real reporting. I also think they read tea leaves poorly…Never an outcry over domestic violence before, there probably will not be one now, etc… so upstarts like TMZ, blogs and youngin’s looking to make a name have scooped them and made them look foolish. These things come in cycles.

    Lastly, regarding the ratings. I am very interested to see show by show numbers. Further it will be interesting to see how the trends go in the fall as Sox broadcasts had to have fallen off a cliff, both midday shows still suck and as much as I like Dale, listening to Mike Holley is nails on a chalkboard.

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  5. On the side, does Red Sox ownership give PR lessons? I think they must have coached Goodell today with the amount of bullshit that came out of his presser.

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    1. “America’s” reaction? Hilarious. No one, except for finger-wagging mediots, is still talking about Roger Goodell.

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    1. The OTL report, which I just read in its entirety, is going to be cause Goodell to loose his job, Newsome to loose his job, Cass to loose his job and possibly force a change of ownership in Baltimore. I said this in a post a few days ago…if the NBA forced Sterling out for being a racist on his own time, what the heck is the NFL going to do with an owner in Biscotti who appears to have covered up a pretty serious domestic violence case to protect a financial deal with M&T Bank, then to cover up the cover up he appears to have tried to bribe Ray Rice into playing ball. All this while the article states this about Ozzie Newsome:

      Newsome believed if the team had weathered the controversy in 2000 when All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis was charged in a double homicide after a Super Bowl party in Atlanta, and had endured the criticism after running back Jamal Lewis’ guilty plea to cocaine trafficking in 2004, it could certainly weather the controversy surrounding this trio of arrests, too.

      Baltimore is a racket. This is organized crime. ESPN drops this on a Friday afternoon. This is going to blow up over the weekend and dominate everything all next week and beyond.

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      1. PFT reported yesterday that Ravens “brass” had an emergency meeting and we learned why. Last night, about 6 hours after the bombshell, they announced that they’d have a follow-up but only after Sunday. Hey, I’m not a PR person, but you do NOT wait on something like that.

        What the report suggests is that the Ravens put playing a mediocre RB ahead of DV, and the entire leadership, from GM to ownership, had no problem lying. It also suggests that the owner is basically bribing Rice with a job offer to keep his mouth shut.

        Yeah, you point out the obvious. If the NFL is suspending coaches for 3 games for ‘homophobic remarks’ and the NBA is forcing owners and GMs out due to it, where the hell does this lie? If true, it looks horrid for the team. So far, besides this, the heat is still on Goodell/NFL, but why isn’t even more on the Ravens? We could also bring up the obvious with the prosecutor. The OTL report said that the “punishment” Rice got was given to less than 1% of people in the same situation.

        You bring up Ray Lewis. I saw someone, who I’d quote if I could find it, and they quoted a league source, “If Balitmore builds Ray Lewis a statue, why would they care much about this?” Your thoughts suggested the same.

        Back to Goodell: Where he could face the most heat is other owners. Basically, he had no problem taking their word and doing zero investigation. I’d be livid if I were an owner who got hit under punishment during Goodell’s tenure and this happened: Kraft and Benson (NO) come to mind.

        This does look like a story that has much more to come.

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        1. Before we call Ray Rice mediocre let’s look at it from Baltimore’s management’s perspective. He was extremely involved in their community out reach programs. he raised millions of charity dollars on behalf of the team including raising money for a battered woman shelter in Baltimore. His business acumen was such that the Ravens trusted him to represent the team as the identifiable “Raven” in a $70 mill ad campaign for M&T Bank. Next to Ray Lewis he might have been the most recognizable Raven in Baltimore. The fact that his play on the field was “meh” is irrelevant to this discussion. Baltimore Ravens management had a financial and personal reason for defending Rice. They liked him and liked him a lot. This would be akin to a video appearing of David Ortiz hitting his wife or Derek Jeter. I think that compounds the problem.

          I am following this hour by hour as a new fact comes out all the time. The question I want answered is this:
          Ray Rice’s lawyer had the tape and is quoted which means it came from either him or Rice as telling the head of Ravens security that this is “f…ing bad”. At that point no one in Ravens management asked to see the tape? That is incredulous to me. The NFL’s hands are also dirty on this because there is no way the Ravens did not inform the commish’s office that Rice’s lawyer had the tape. They say they asked for it from law enforcement…why not ask Rice’s lawyer for it…unless you do not want to see it.

          Lastly, on how the other owners feel. I will write a longer post on that later today…but my feeling is they all felt doing favors to protect the league is a good thing. I don’t think they felt any franchise was getting special treatment…they all looked at this and thought…if that was my team I expect the commish to react the same way.

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        2. Regarding your “how the other owners feel” point. I don’t think any owner thinks the commissioner plays favorites with the possible exception of Tom Benson who is still angry about the Bountygate punishments. I think the owners all understand that the Commish is there to insulate the 32 owners from the criticism that results from having to make unpopular decisions. So to me Goodell would have tried to cover this up whether it was a Baltimore Ravens player, A Jax Jag player or an Oakland Raider. His primary responsibility to is the fiduciary side of the league. Having a player blow a$70 mill advertising campaign for a sponsor, over something as ambiguous as a domestic violence complaint is not in the best interest of any team…especially more so if the player is well liked and is involved with team wide marketing events.

          I think the owners like him, as evidenced but the fact that he still has a job. However they will have to move on from him if it becomes apparent that the brand is suffering because of whatever shortfalls he has.

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          1. My question would be, as to the “shield” Goodell is against them, what happens when the guy is swiss cheese? Aren’t we there now? At this point, some in the media will start going after them, no? It just seems like we’re there now. Sponsors dropping out, etc. And, in 2 weeks, they’ll roll out their pink month stuff. That isn’t going to look good because about the only thing that might change between now and then is more sponsors dropping or more players arrested.

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  7. http://espn.go.com/espn/print?id=11551518&type=story

    “Four sources said Ravens executives, including Bisciotti, Cass and Newsome, urged Goodell and other league executives to give Rice no more than a two-game suspension, and that’s what Goodell did on July 24.”

    This.

    Goodell works for the owners. The NFL league office is a non-profit entity.

    What does firing Goodell accomplish? It would allow the NFL owners to pass the buck down to their lower-level employee. And it would pacify loudmouth Sport Talk Radio vultures.

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    1. Firing Goodell needs to be done because the business side of the NFL is going to start demanding it. In 3 years when the TV contracts come back up, if Goodell is still in place the networks are going to say the property is not worth as much as it once was because people think the commissioners office is not looking out for the best interests of football (in other words there will be a belief that the fix is in). It may or may not be true…it only has to be PERCEIVED to be true to cause the NFL a several $bill headache. The simplest and fastest way for the 32 owners to make this scenario never happen is to replace Goodell. Someone has to be the fall guy…it is going to be Goodell because there is no one else in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      The media members calling for his head for the most part are right in calling for it but are doing so for the wrong reason. They think his attempt to cover this up should get him fired…I say that is what the owners pay him to do…instead they should be looking at the business angle and what is the single most efficient way to end this mess. Fire Goodell. It is no more complicated than that.

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  8. Oh… my.. irony….

    ESPN had Ray Lewis on “analyzing” the stuff OTL dug up on the Ravens with the Ray Rice case this morning:

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