sports
The biggest taboo in American media has nothing to do with race, gender, or class. It involves the news itself.
Ever notice no one ever says, “Hell if I know” on a cable news show? Despite the fact that most media figures have huge knowledge gaps about the news (which after all is the set of all things on Earth), we’re trained to offer opinions even when we have no clue.
Part of this has to do with the internal logic of news media, at its core an entertainment product. It triggers suspension of disbelief if someone on air admits to not knowing the history of Kurd-Turk relations, or the hierarchy of Venezuelan socialism, or the rules of a government shutdown.
We’re also training audiences to fear being caught not knowing, and to believe it’s shameful to be ignorant of news. You think Wolf Blitzer doesn’t know what’s going on in the Sri Lankan civil war? Who’s the reigning party in Japan’s House of Councilors? Who’s currently occupying Idlib?
(Wolf Blitzer doesn’t know shit. He finished with -$4,600 on Jeopardy. Asked for a 5-letter word describing an “economic crash” he replied, “What is a crash?” In another category he was told in advance the answer would contain three letter “Es.” His guess was “Annotated.” Wolf Blitzer reads a teleprompter. Don’t ever feel inferior to Wolf Blitzer.)
News companies don’t just want you feeling ashamed of not knowing the news. That’s desperate marketing, ring-around-the-collar tactics. They want you so emotionally invested that your psyche falls apart if the wrong story appears on screen. We want you awake at night, teeth chattering, panicking about things over which you have no control.
Ahead of your families, friends, lovers, jobs, pets or any of ten dozen other things that more naturally decide the happiness of sane people, we want you obsessing over the cosmic coin flip that is news. It has to matter more to you than anything on earth.
When networks went in the direction of building this kind of audience for news, they knew exactly how to do it, because they had an existing, successful business model. They knew what the perfect news consumer looked like because he was already reading the sports page.
News purveyors knew: if they could find a way to cover politics like sports, and get news consumers behaving like the emotional captives we call sports fans, cash would flow like a river.
How to pull that off? The main thing is, don’t break the spell.
A professional sportscaster in America may do just about anything in public, even things that from the outside appear to stretch the absolute limits of human idiocy.
He or she may howl like a child over a missed free throw, treat Jeff Fisher like Stephen Hawking, report the seventh round of the NFL draft like the Nuremburg trial, ask an athlete to measure his bicep mid-interview, or even fart on the air.
The one thing Mr. Sportscaster can’t ever do is remind audiences it’s just a game. He or she can’t ever tell them it’s okay not to care.
In fact, the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don’t know and I don’t care. The dynamic is more grotesque and ridiculous in sports, as one radio man found out just this year.
In mid January, as the New England Patriots were getting ready to play the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC title game, a Boston-based sports radio host named Fred Toettcher was invited to talk football by a Chicago radio station called 670 The Drive.
“I’m not even sure who invited me,” Toettcher said later. “I got a text from a producer.”
The Chicago show was called McNeil and Parkins. Hosts Dan McNeil and Danny Parkins pilot AM 670’s afternoon slot using a typical modern sports-talk format, i.e. a room full of homerific meatheads who cheer their teams at all costs and egg their fan bases on to do the same.
The city of Chicago had no skin in the Chiefs-Pats game. But neutral cities will often invite one radio personality from each market to come on and hype a big event.
What you’re looking for if you’re a producer of one of these segments is a caricature of each city, so hosts can poke fun. From Kansas City you want a slow-talking cowpoke who literally eats barbecue during the interview. From Boston, you want a thin-skinned racist with a Dorchester accent who wears Patriots underpants – basically, an extra from The Departed.
Toettcher was invited on so a couple of guffawing jocks could make Boston jokes.
If you didn’t have Google, having Toettcher play the “Boston” role in this segment made at least some sense. He does co-host the top-rated sports program in Boston. Along with Rich Shertenlieb, their Toucher and Rich show on Boston’s 98.5 FM just pulled a 10.8 share in the coveted morning slot in 2018’s Fall Nielsen ratings.
A ten share is hot stuff in sports radio. If a sports program is pulling those numbers, you can assume it’s a fan favorite.
Here a small detail is worth pointing out, because this chapter is about the phoniness of on-air rancor, and there’s an element to the absurd scene that ensued that would escape most casual listeners.
Boston’s Sports Hub and 670 The Score were once broadcast partners under the national CBS umbrella. However, in late 2017, there was a merger of two major national sports radio networks, CBS and Entercom. This temporarily put Boston’s two bitter sports-talk rivals – CBS’s “Sports Hub” and Entercom’s WEEI – in the same corporate tent.
For reasons too boring to explain here, Sports Hub was eventually forced out of the CBS/Entercom family to eliminate a potential antitrust problem. This landed Toucher and Rich and the rest of the Sports Hub programs with new ownership, under a consortium called The Beasley Group.
I bring this up only to point out that had this Chicago-Boston interview taken place a few years earlier, it not only wouldn’t have been hostile, it couldn’t have been hostile, because that would have been CBS-on-CBS crime.
In fact, Toettcher had been a guest on The Score countless times back in the days when 670 was a sister station, and had never gotten any grief.
“I’d been on there like, 20 times,” Toettcher recalls.
Now, however, Toettcher wasn’t a fellow CBS personality. He was just a jock from an unaffiliated Boston station, fair game. The Score even plugged his upcoming segment by misidentifying his station:
“Coming up next, Fred Toettcher, from the Toucher and Rich show, WEEI Boston…”
As Toettcher later explained on the air, “I think they assumed we were part of Entercom because of the sale.”
In any case, Toettcher got on air with McNeil and Parkins and was asked if he was excited about the game. Verbally, he shrugged.
He explained he’d been doing Boston sports for years and in a yawning voice said, “[the Patriots] always just win.” If they did happen to get to the Super Bowl, he joked, “I’d have to go to Atlanta where there’s three hours of TSA to get back here, and I’m not looking forward to that.”
The Chicago guys jumped all over this.
“It sounds like you don’t want them to win,” said Parkins, the younger, skinnier half of the Chicago duo.
Toettcher sighed. “I don’t care,” he said. “I just want it to be interesting.”
Toettcher really didn’t care. He’s from Atlanta.
“I’m not a fan of the Patriots,” he says now. “My audience knows I’m not a fan of the Patriots.”
Everyone who listens to sports radio in Boston knows this about Toucher and Rich. Their schtick is two out-of-town, laid-back rock deejays who don’t hide the fact that they don’t really care about the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox or Bruins. Part of the charm of the show is the hosts’ total indifference to the results of games in a sports-crazy town.
The Chicago hosts didn’t know this, but one senses that even if they had, they wouldn’t have believed it. They listened in stunned silence as Toettcher went on to explain what the one nice thing about the Patriots winning in Kansas City would be, from his point of view.
“I spent eight years in Atlanta, so I’d like to see friends there,” he said. “But I don’t care who wins this game.”
The Chicago guys started to explode with laughter. Toettcher cut them off.
“Wait, you guys always care?” he asked. “If there’s a Chicago team in a championship, you always have a rooting interest?”
“Yeah!” said Parkins.
“Yeah, we’re Bears fans,” said McNeil.
“Boston’s seen too many titles if you don’t care who wins the championship game,” said Parkins.
Toettcher explained again. “I’m not from here. My allegiances lie elsewhere. But listen, it helps the bottom line when they win, so…”
The Chicago hosts were determined to have Toettcher get in character. They wanted him to pump up the Patriots. They even opened their interview of the Atlanta native to the tune of Shipping Up to Boston by the Dropkick Murphys, famous for being soundtrack to The Departed. Then they tried to bait him by playing a mumbly quote from Bill Belichick.
“Something tells me, Fred, that no one in Boston cares that [Belichick’s] not the greatest quote, right?” asked Parkins.
Probably they were guessing Toettcher would defend Boston’s legendary curmudgeon. But Toettcher, who is not a sports guy but a comic and a rock deejay, brightened at the chance to have fun with the Belichick theme.
“Actually, there are two things that get [Belichick] going,” he quipped. “One is talking about punters. The second is a little music by Bo-n-n-n Jovi.”
Dead silence.
“He, uh, immediately lights up,” continued Toettcher, who’d expected a laugh. “That is… a way to the man’s heart.”
More silence. Toettcher realized he was in for a difficult interview.
“Alright,” Parkins finally said. Then, addressing his co-host, he added with sarcasm. “If we ever get [Belichick], Mac, Bon Jovi’s the way we’ll start him off.”
The agonizing interview went on like this. At one point the duo pressed Toettcher on the Patriots using the “nobody believed in us” card.
They seemed to want him to defend this. Toettcher not only called it “crap,” but pointed out that Patriots receiver Julian Edelman was charging $30 for BET AGAINST US t-shirts, and “if you buy one of those, you’re a dope.”
More silence. The hosts clearly wanted a Boston homer, and what they got was a rock radio personality from Atlanta making fun of the Patriots and their fans. It went on a bit longer, the Score hosts thanked Toettcher, and he hung up.
Some time later, Toettcher had a bad feeling about the interview. He cued up the podcast version of it online.
Listening, he found out that ten seconds after he’d gone off air, the Chicago crew started busting on him.
“Let’s hope,” they said, “our next guest has more enthusiasm for the topic.”
McNeil”went on a rant about what a terrible guest Toettcher had been. “Fred went down on three pitches,” he said. “I don’t think we need to call him again.”
The Chicago crew pored over his “I don’t care who wins” comment like it was an anomalous blood test result.
“I bet he doesn’t act like that on the air in Boston. I don’t think that would go over real well with Patriots fans,” McNeil concluded.
“Yeah, it’s a Jets fan doing sports in Boston pulling a ten share,” quipped Parkins.
“Oh, really, really,” groaned McNeil.
The Chicago hosts were wrong. Toucher and Rich strikes exactly that indifferent tone. The show is a genuinely interesting experiment in media.
The two were holdovers from the rock station WBCN. When CBS launched the new all-sports format at the Sports Hub in 2009, it decided to keep the pair on in the coveted morning drive slot.
“I think the idea was to see if we could get a younger audience,” Toettcher explains.
Toucher and Rich runs counter to conventional assumptions about how sports media (and, increasingly, the news media as a whole) works in this country. Despite being the top sports show in maybe the most virulently sports-mad, homerific city in America, Boston, the hosts go completely off-script.
They don’t troll other cities, don’t feed hometown paranoia about referees or national media, and don’t fellate the local sports heroes. They do nothing to make audiences feel like Boston or Boston teams are inherently better than other cities.
Instead, they make fun of how absurd pro sports is in general and do a light-hearted, informative morning show that reminds fans not to take themselves or anything else too seriously. They have regular interviews of local sports figures like Celtics president Danny Ainge, but you don’t turn off the program ready to dive off a building if the Celtics lose a game.
The sports format Toucher and Rich parodies is standard almost everywhere in the country.
Sports journalism – especially local sports journalism – is usually pure manipulation. (The stations are also often owned or sponsored by local teams, so there’s a mandatory rah-rah factor as well.) Sports media strategy is based on the idea that the core audience has a powerful dependence on the local team, and will tune in to anything that reaffirms its slavish rooting interests.
The flip side of cheering is hating, so part of that formula is hating everything about rival teams and fan bases.
Most sports media trains audiences to see the world as a weird dualistic theology. The home city is a safe space where the righteous team is cheered and irrational worship is encouraged. Everywhere else is darkness.
Opposing fans are deluded haters. Increasingly most local fan bases are encouraged to see the national sports media as arrayed against them, too. Long before Donald Trump trained followers to see CNN as fake news, countless local fan bases learned to despise ESPN as a corporate villain out to undermine their team.
The local sports personalities inevitably encourage this, too, feeding conspiracy theories about everyone from Chris Mortensen to Curt Schilling. “Why does ESPN hate us?” is a message-board topic for virtually every fan base in every major sport.
The paranoia about both national media and the opposing fans is now such a central part of the fan experience that for some modern fans, the dread of an opposing city reveling in their city’s loss outweighs the potential satisfaction of winning.
There are Red Sox fans who’d prefer to not make the playoffs at all than lose to the Yankees there, and vice versa.
Because of all of these factors, the local on-air sports personality is now almost always a homer with a conspicuous regional accent who puffs up every local player and feeds the paranoia/inferiority complexes of callers.
Toettcher over the years has been amazed at how far counterparts in other cities will go to play up the “other cities suck” act.
He tells a story about 2016, when the Atlanta Hawks beat the Celtics in the playoffs. A local sports station, 92.9 The Game, hosted by Rick Kamla (who is from Minnesota, not Atlanta) cooked up a “Boston sucks” song and performed it at a local bar.
The song was called “Shipping Them Back to Boston” and was, you guessed it, a parody of that same “Shipping Up to Boston song.” The opening lines:
What’s up, Boston? Whatcha got now? You drowning in chowder?
“The chowder thing drives me crazy,” says Toettcher. “Why do you hate soup? What’s wrong with you?“
Kamla sang the next portion of the song:
Atlanta rocks and Boston sucks and I’m only telling the truthWay to go on that brilliant idea to trade away Babe RuthIt was wicked awesome beating you, and now you’re home just like the KnicksYou may have more championships, but we have more champion chicks!
“Champion chicks?” Toettcher says. “Seriously?”
When Toucher and Rich first got hold of the recording years ago, they had some fun on the air with Kamla and his song. This is a persistent parody theme in their show, the notion that a person who isn’t from City X will get a broadcast job there and suddenly transform into the world’s biggest Texans or Yankees or, in Kamla’s case, Falcons fan.
A sportscaster who gets into that mode will inevitably start to pander to the audience, willing to say anything for ratings. As Toettcher put it on air, they become like a man who’s so desperate to get a woman in bed, he tells her on the third date he’s interested in having children.
What follows is a symbiotic stupidity cycle. Fans become conditioned to having their dumbest ideas ratified, and sportscasters every day have to go deeper and deeper into the jungle of homerism to keep callers happy.
“Basically they’ll say anything to make fans emotionally dependent on the team,” Toettcher says. “They say, ‘I’ll be the pied piper. I’ll hold up the banner. And you’ll love me and love me and love me.”
Toettcher explains he and Shertenlieb don’t use the same formula because it’s annoying.
“You’ve got someone who’s just telling you what you want to hear over and over,” he says. “That would be the most annoying person to hang out with.”
Also, he says, it’s not natural.
“If you’re a Patriots fan and you’re at a dinner, and some guy there says he’s a Kansas City sports fan, what are you going to do, get up and leave? No. You’d be polite. That’s how people behave, in real life.”
I asked Toettcher if he’d noticed at all that this same on-air strategy had spread to political media.
“Definitely,” he says. “Since Trump’s been President… It’s just like sports. You pick a side and that’s your identity. There’s a lack of nuance. A lack of gray area.”
The phoniness, the constant hyping of conflict, the endless stroking of audience prejudices and expectations, these all started as staples of sports media. But now that same commercial formula has moved down the dial.
“It’s exactly like the political discourse on TV,” Toettcher says.
News stations are a lot more careful to prevent such outbreaks of disbelief-suspending honesty. They call ahead of time to make sure neither I don’t know nor I don’t care get anywhere near live cameras.
Most cable shows conduct pre-interviews. Typically, the show’s producer will call and toss out the same questions the host asks later.
This is part educational exercise, in which the producer picks the guest’s brain in search of nuggets the show might want to explore. It’s also audition, designed to weed out inept performers. If you stammer in the face of a surprise question, you’ll be told at the last minute you’ve been bumped over “time constraints” or some other transparent excuse.
The primary motive for the pre-interview, though, is to make sure guests stay in character. In both sports and news media, the biggest crime is to break type.
The usual setup of almost any live-variety news show is a host who intros an issue, flanked by a pro guest and an anti guest. The segment producer wants to ensure lively crosstalk, so the “pre-interview” is designed to make sure you’ll say what the producer expects you to say.
They usually don’t need to ask. If Chris Matthews has proudly liberal Joan Walsh on to talk affirmative action with Pat Buchanan, he knows he can sleepwalk through that player-piano setup: Walsh is automatically going to find a way to argue for affirmative action and denounce white privilege, and Buchanan is going to hit back by bleating about reverse racism.
But stations still usually make sure there’s no off-the-reservation opinion on the horizon. If you’re brought on to play the Democrat, they make sure in advance you’ll stay in that lane. If you’re brought on to argue the red side, same thing.
These days, however, actual interplay between disagreeing guests is rare. Like sports channels, news outlets increasingly are more like cheering sections than debate forums. They’re safe intellectual spaces for their respective audiences. You get your side from your channel, while the other side gets its news on another channel.
It’s not uncommon now for a channel like CNN to have a host surrounded by three or four guests, all offering different takes on the terribleness of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Fox, as it’s been for decades, remains a place where conservatives tune in to see on-air figures collectively own the libs. Don’t be surprised to see Tomi Lahren surrounded by like-minded yahoos, all yammering about the terrors of Antifa.
If the first rule of Fight Club is no talking about Fight Club, the first rule of political debate shows is no reminding audiences they’re watching political debate shows.
You can’t get on a talk show and point out the news subject of the hour probably wouldn’t ever come up your day-to-day life, minus prompting from someone in the press. You can’t say, “Actually, you wouldn’t know Antifa from antifreeze if you didn’t watch this station.”
Nobody on any channel ever tells you to take a deep breath and relax. On the contrary, the whole aesthetic of modern news is to make you feel a constantly rising tension, fear you’re missing out.
A typical cable news channel is a nightmare visual of screeching heads surrounded by big alarmist boxes and crawls that scream, BREAKING: LOTS OF SCARY NEW SHIT.
Unlike sports, the news isn’t a game. It’s genuinely important (although I would argue the networks rarely show the most important issues to audiences, opting for the easiest/most inflammatory instead). The deception lay in the fact that there’s anything the ordinary person can do about the reams of troubling information we throw at you.
There’s more hunger and misery and cheating and corruption and prejudice and unfairness in the world than any one person could even begin to make sense of, let alone do anything about. Yet we bombard you with headlines all day long, and increasingly present the news as a sports-like zero-sum battle between two sides, in which every day can only end with heartbreak or triumph for your belief system.
In sports it’s a major taboo for a broadcaster to admit the outcome of any sporting event shouldn’t be in the top 50 concerns for any sane human being, or point out that just because teams from two cities are playing each other, doesn’t mean people from those places should dislike one another.
“I felt like asking those guys from Chicago, what if your team was playing Sacramento in a final?” says Toettcher. “Are you going to start hating Sacramento?”
Political news media is similar. It’s a variety show designed to freak you out, and as a ratings strategy we’ve made not freaking out taboo. Any guest who’d be likely to tell you to calm down or spend more time with your kids won’t make it past the pre-interview.
We get people so invested in news stories that they’re unable to cope when headlines spit out the wrong way. People fall to pieces over election results and other news stories. It’s madness, and we’d never treat you this way – if it weren’t the best way for us to make money.
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