Whether it’s unions or universities, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has waged a number of huge fights — symbolic and otherwise — with liberals. So far, the fights have only served to bolster his credentials among national conservatives who like nothing more than a Republican willing to poke liberals in the eye.
And now New York Times columnist Gail Collins has thrown Walker another hanging curveball by which to bash liberals and shine in the eyes of conservatives.
In a recent column widely derided as a “hit piece” by conservatives, Collins centered on Walker’s breakout speech in Iowa, declaring that it was “his moment.” Known for her stream-of-consciousness writing style, Collins sets herself up as a kind of fact-checker of Walker’s record. She blames the governor for cutting state aid to education that led to teacher layoffs — particularly in regard to one teacher who had been honored.
But there was just one big problem with that assertion: Walker wasn’t actually in office when said cuts were made.
The headline — “Scott Walker Needs an Eraser” — pretty much said it all, except it wasn’t Walker who needed one.
The correction, which came two days after the column was posted, said: “An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that teacher layoffs in Milwaukee in 2010 happened because Gov. Scott Walker ‘cut state aid to education.’ The layoffs were made by the city’s school system because of a budget shortfall, before Mr. Walker took office in 2011.” …
It all goes back to the 2012 recall effort, in which unions and liberals overstepped by seeking to remove Walker as governor because of his decision to roll back collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions. They lost, and suddenly they had created a world-beating conservative hero who just won another election in a blue-leaning state. He has won three races in four-plus years — a fact he will remind crowds of often, and one that wouldn’t be true without that overreach.
Now, with another defeat of Collins and the “liberal media,” the legend of Walker — slayer of all things liberal — continues to grow. In a crowded field in which everyone will clamor for the conservative label, Walker has that distinct advantage.
Scott Walker is discovering what happens when you (appear to be about to) run for president — you become target number one of the political news media.
That includes the media that can’t shoot straight. Gail Collins of the New York Times decided to rip on Walker:
Mainly, though, The Speech was about waging war on public employee unions, particularly the ones for teachers. “In 2010, there was a young woman named Megan Sampson who was honored as the outstanding teacher of the year in my state. And not long after she got that distinction, she was laid off by her school district,” said Walker, lacing into teacher contracts that require layoffs be done by seniority.
All of that came as a distinct surprise to Claudia Felske, a member of the faculty at East Troy High School who actually was named a Wisconsin Teacher of the Year in 2010. In a phone interview, Felske said she still remembers when she got the news at a “surprise pep assembly at my school.” As well as the fact that those layoffs happened because Walker cut state aid to education [emphasis added].
Actually, Wisconsin names four teachers of the year, none of which has ever been Megan Sampson, who won an award for first-year English teachers given by a nonprofit group. But do not blame any of this on Sampson, poor woman, who was happily working at a new school in 2011 when Walker made her the star victim in an anti-union opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. At the time, she expressed a strong desire not to be used as a “poster child for this political agenda,” and you would think that after that the governor would leave her alone. Or at least stop saying she was teacher of the year.
So what’s wrong with Collins’ First Amendment-protected opinion, you ask? John McCormack is happy to tell you:
First, she accuses Walker of dishonesty, but she’s just quibbling over semantics. Is it really inaccurate to describe someone named an “outstanding first-year teacher” by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English as a “teacher of the year” for short? I’ve never seen much of a difference: In the headline of this 2011 piece, I described Sampson as a “teacher of the year,” but in the body of the piece I precisely described her award. Walker has been telling this story for four years, and no one thought his description of Sampson was dishonest until Gail Collins heard about it.
But the big error in Collins’s piece is her claim that “those layoffs happened because Walker cut state aid to education.” As you can see in the excerpt above, Collins is talking about teacher layoffs that occurred in 2010. Walker did not become governor until 2011.
The truth is that Walker’s reforms actually saved teachers’ jobs. Right before the 2012 Wisconsin recall election, Walker’s Democratic opponent Tom Barrett couldn’t name a single school that had been hurt by Walker’s policies. When Walker’s 2014 Democratic opponent Mary Burke was asked to name any schools hurt by Walker’s collective bargaining reform, she relayed an anecdote she’d heard secondhand about one school. Burke’s story didn’t check out, and the superintendent of that school wrote a letter telling Burke she didn’t know what she was talking about.
That’s a good reminder for Gail Collins (and the rest of us): Always check your facts.
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review hour (though Joy is not hosting it) this morning at 8.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
My foil is a fellow member of the Former Journal Communications Employees Club (a growing group), though he still has a Sunday column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Eleven hours from this, I will be announcing high school boys basketball on www.theespndoubleteam.com. Between that, this blog and my day job, I probably am, as Charlie Sykes once called me, a media ho.
UW-Madison journalism doctoral student Michael Mirer complains in the Washington Post:
You might think that one of the nation’s leading academic communication programs would be a good place to make a long-distance phone call.
Yet there I was on a cold January morning, the interview I needed to get less than 15 minutes away, panic mounting as each attempt to dial out on my department-issued speakerphone produced an electronic wail rather than a ring tone. I’m writing my dissertation on how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism. I collect my data by talking to the people who work for these sites. I need a working phone. My cell was acting as my voice recorder, so I couldn’t use it to make calls — not that the reception in my office is good enough to be trusted.
During one of the many rounds of budget cuts the University of Wisconsin has endured over the past few years, the department ended all nonessential long-distance service. This was essential to me, I explained to the front-office staff. I am hoping to log about 25 hours of interviews with people who are outside the university’s 608 area code. Long-distance phone calls cost less than 4 cents per minute; the entire project would cost about $60, surely something could be worked out? Could I pay for it myself? Write a grant? They didn’t think so.
There’s no using the telephone in, of all places, the communication department. The budget is too tight. The phone jack in my office is a vestige of a time when the state invested in higher education. …
I found a workaround for my phone problem. That day it involved using a phone line that turned out to belong to another unit in our building, so I shouldn’t have used it. The department staff found me a line in one of the research labs that should work, although it didn’t the first time. A professor on my PhD committee had just reactivated her own long-distance calling for research purposes and offered me the use of her phone, when she’s not using it. Or I can use Skype, which is glitchy and takes lousy recordings on the computer I’m holding together with masking tape. I’ll be able to get the job done, but barely. Sort of like what the university has done in the past few years.
Facebook Friend and author Virginia Postrel describes this as “self-parody,” and that Mirer’s screed is “beyond stupid. I can only conclude that the guy is somehow in Scott Walker’s employ. It’s like an extended argument for shutting down the UWM school of journalism and communications, or at least its Ph.D. program. They’re letting in idiots.”
If Wisconsin taxpayers wonder how a doctoral dissertation on “how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism” advances mankind, well, you’re not alone.
One person who tried to defend this, and got hammered, had to admit:
Look: this guy’s kind of a schmuck. Let’s not paint all student journalists with the schmuck brush.
Yeah, well, you’d hope someone who spent at least six years in college to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both of which considerably subsidized by your tax dollars, would not be a schmuck.
Another comment pointed out:
He is writing about websites owned by sports teams… I am pretty sure that the closet that comes to journalism is that they both involve words. Give me a guy writing his PhD on exposing public or private corruption or generally making the world a better place. But sports websites? Seriously? Why do I get the feeling his best friend is a PhD candidate over in Engineering that is upset he can’t get enough AA batteries to finish his dissertation on the evolution of Pokemon on Gameboy.
Another person in academia, though apparently with common sense, adds:
I’ve been in this profession for a quarter century, and there has never been a time where we’ve not said “we are barely scraping by.” Your use of resources always expand to what the resources are and then it seems like you are “barely scraping by.” There is lots of fat to cut in academica, folks.
Another comment makes you wonder how much Mirer has learned in his six-plus years at our state’s world-class university:
The danger of using personal anecdotes to introduce a policy oriented article is that readers will conclude from the anecdote that you are an idiot before they get to your argumentation. When I was last interviewed for an NPR story the reporter taught me how to record the interview on my smartphone, took about 20 seconds.
My own smartphone, which is really not very state-of-the-current-art (the purchase price was right), records and plays back all of my pregame coach interviews, whether on the phone or in person. It also includes pregame music. I have even announced games on it. I also chronicled damage from tornadoes onto Facebook, apparently making me the only media person live on the scene (or whatever “live” means online) immediately following the tornadoes.
I note that not to brag about my professional abilities or my technological expertise, because, as Postrel points out …
… as a professional journalist since 1982 I have utter contempt for someone in 2015 who cannot figure out how to record off a cell phone (even without involving Skype or similar services). I do it all the time. It is a basic professional skill, requiring minimal equipment
At some point, journalists have to learn resourcefulness. Media outlets are notorious, and have always been, for not entirely adequately equipping their reporters and other in-field people. (Total cost of my sound and recording and camera apps: Zero.)
But the contempt in Postrel’s previous paragraph pales in comparison to what follows:
Although I do believe that communications (aka rhetoric) is a legitimate and important field of study, it is also the unfortunate case that it exists primarily to provide easy majors for people who want to spend their college years partying or playing sports or both. I’m skeptical about whether journalism schools should exist at all.
Arguments against the proposed $300 million in UW System funding cuts should be made by someone who can use facts and logic. That apparently does not include Mirer. On the other hand, if the saying “Those who can’t do, teach” is accurate, he’s perfect for academia … unless the UW System takes up Postrel’s proposal.
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself what the Green Bay Packers would have done if they had been in the Seattle Seahawks‘ shoes at the New England Patriots‘ 1-yard line with the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX ticking way.
Would coach Mike McCarthy have done like the Seahawks and called a pass play? Or would he have given the ball to one of his bruising backs, Eddie Lacy or John Kuhn?
History tells us either option would have been in play.
According to ESPN Stats & Information, the Packers had 19 goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line during the regular season. They threw the ball on 10 of them. On those 10 plays, quarterback Aaron Rodgers completed five passes — all for touchdowns.
On the nine runs, they scored five touchdowns. Lacy carried in six of those nine plays, and scored four times. Kuhn got the ball twice and didn’t score on either one. Rodgers took it once, on a sneak against the Detroit Lions in Week 17, and scored.
In the playoffs, the Packers had two more snaps with just 1-yard to go for a touchdown. They ran on both, and failed on both — once by Kuhn and once by Lacy. They came on consecutive plays — second-and-goal from the 1 and third-and-goal from the 1 — in the first quarter of the NFC Championship Game at Seattle. They tried Kuhn up the middle on second down, and the officials initially ruled he scored. However, upon further review from the replay booth, Kuhn was ruled down just short of the goal line. On the next play, Lacy ran off left guard didn’t come close to the goal line. On both plays, the Packers were in their jumbo package with seven offensive linemen, two backs and a tight end.
The Packers’ final percentages looked like this: Including playoffs, they ran the ball on 52.4 percent of their goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line and threw it on 47.6 percent of those plays. Their success rate was 45.5 percent when running the ball in those situations and 55.5 percent throwing it.
This is interesting, but an imperfect analysis because there was no comparable situation to having the ball on the opponent’s 1-yard line with seconds remaining. It seems obvious with one time out remaining that you have time to run the ball, and if, in Sunday’s case, Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch doesn’t get in the end zone, you can use your last time out and set up third-down and fourth-down plays.
The bigger issue to me isn’t necessarily passing instead of running. The Seahawks have a mobile quarterback in Russell Wilson. They could have run the read option with Wilson. They also could have (and this would have been my choice had I been in Carroll’s shoes) run a run/pass option play, where Wilson would roll out and, depending on what was available, run it in himself or thrown it into the end zone.
If you think you have to pass, the number one priority, with one time out, is do not turn over the ball. (If you don’t have a time out, that’s priority 1A; priority 1B is to make sure the clock stops, by going or throwing out of bounds.) So throwing the ball into the middle of the Patriots defense — which, remember, has only 11 yards to have to defend, the 1-yard line and the end zone — is the worst possible play call.
The Seahawks’ decision to pass instead of run seems even stranger when you consider that none of the Seahawks’ receivers are nearly as good as the Packers’ Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb. Wilson may become as good a quarterback as Aaron Rodgers, but Wilson isn’t there yet. It’s hard for me to imagine Rodgers throwing the pass Wilson threw; he would have fired the ball into the seats instead of throwing into all those white shirts.
The Super Bowl now is watched almost as much for the commercials and halftime show (which featured a lion-ish-looking thing, which prompted the observation that that is the first time a Lion has gotten into a Super Bowl) as much as for the game. The Federalist picks apart two of those commercials:
This ad was the first really bad one to air. It’s about a father missing all of his child’s milestones because he was at work (as a race car driver) and then showing up at the end in a shiny red car as if this makes up for it. To make matters worse, the ad used Harry Chapin’s “Cat in the Cradle,” as the music. That’s a song about how fathers too busy to be with their sons end up having sons too busy to spend time with their fathers. It’s horribly depressing.
If one assumes that Nissan has a goal of selling automobiles with this ad, one must assume that the ad executives thought they were portraying this absentee father sympathetically. And with 24 million children in America living in homes without fathers, this isn’t a great idea. The Nissan child wouldn’t even qualify as a child living in a home without a father, he just has a father too busy to spend time with him. But father absence plays a significant role in poverty, emotional and behavioral problems, infant mortality, incarceration, crime, teen pregnancy, child abuse, sexual abuse, alcohol and substance abuse, and educational lags. Showing up one day with a new red car isn’t really a solution to all of these problems.
The worst part of the ad? He doesn’t even let his son drive. Worst car ad ever.
Easily the worst of the Superbowl ads was Nationwide insurance’s ad about how your kid is going to die and it will be your fault and so you should buy insurance for when that happens. It’s just as bad as it sounds. A kid starts talking about how he won’t ever learn to ride a bike, kiss a girl or fly because he will be killed. And then it goes to the tub where he drowns. And the sink where he swallows a bunch of poison.
What’s the problem? Insurance is all about the fact that bad things happen in life, right?
Sure. But the tagline of the commercial is “Make Safe Happen” and Julia Roberts, I believe, says “Together we can make safe happen.” This is not true. We will never be safe and we need to understand that. Parents, in particular, need to grasp this. They are trying so hard to keep anything bad from happening to their kids that they’re willing to sacrifice any amount of childhood to obtain it. The very worst thing that could happen is for parents to become more obsessively concerned about keeping their kids safe from all risk. …
This helicopter parenting mentality is what causes Child Protective Services to be called when fully functioning children walk a short distance home from the park. This is what leads neighbors to fret over children mowing lawns. This is why playgrounds have become boring and why young adults know next to nothing about proper decision-making and calculation of risk.
This ad is everything that’s wrong with childhood in America. Although it did lead to some funny tweeting:
OK, that’s rather tasteless, but if it doesn’t cut too close to home to you, that would be funny. As for the Nissan ad (which some claim was misread), the use of Chapin’s maudlin dreck made me think of how Chapin died. Yes, a car crash, because Chapin was a legendarily bad driver and didn’t have a driver’s license during his last drive.
A comment added:
I hated the Turbo Tax ad. The Tea Party and then George Washington get Turbo Tax so meh no reason to fight the British. There goes America. Maybe next year Eisenhower will get help with his taxes and leave Europe to the Nazis.
Meanwhile, BangShift brings up a Super Bowl commercial that ran exactly once:
While Hank Stram and his Kansas City Chiefs were running over the Minnesota Vikings and nearly 45 million Americans were watching the ad below came onto their screens. Unfortunately for Pontiac, some of those 45 million people were high ranking GM executives who were already feeling heat from insurance companies and the general public about these land-based rocket ships they were building and marketing towards kids. So when an ad came on that was promoting an option that may or may not have been legal by showing a guy trolling for street races, they freaked the F out.
So the ad below is famously known as the “Humbler” spot because it is introducing what the company was going to call its “Humbler” option in the form of dash controlled, vacuum operated exhaust cutouts. As the kid in the commercial does, the driver would pull the knob and the pipes would open letting all of that 4ooci, 350hp music fill the air, the drive in, the burger stand, or the starting line on whatever street the kids gathered to race on. Amazingly, after this ad was shown one time it was pulled out of rotation and never seen on television again. Presumably on Monday morning after the game, calls came down from on high to cancel the VOE (vacuum operated exhaust) option and cancel it effective at that second. Because of this, only 233 1970 GTOs were sold with this option before it was stopped. Pontiac freaks will tell you that if you look at the bracket that holds the Ram Air knob under the dash there is a catch where the cable for the VOE would have gone…if they ever sold it in volume.
November 1969-January 1970 manufacturing dates were the only cars that could have received the installation of the VOE because it was after the game when the hammer came down on it and hard. Someone had to have lost their job over it, even if it wasn’t a high level guy we’re sure that someone’s head was lopped off. That’s just how stuff works.
It amazes me to say this, as someone who has no plans to ever retire, but I will be replaced someday. No one, except probably Paul Harvey, is irreplaceable.
For those who want to follow my ink-stained wretchedness (for some inexplicable reason), I pass on the advice of Simon Owens:
If you decide to pursue a career in journalism, it’s pretty much hammered into you from day one that you should expect grueling hours and little pay. And while working those grueling hours, you’ll likely have to deal with PR people, many of whom are former journalists who love to start their conversations with you by reminiscing about their gumshoe days.
Though I’ve never completely left journalism, I’ve often been pulled to the dark side. When I left my job as a newspaper reporter to work at a digital marketing firm, I saw an immediate 50 percent bump in pay. And within a year of taking that new job, I more than doubled my salary. If I had remained in newspaper journalism, there’s no conceivable way I could have seen that sharp of a pay increase that quickly.
This pay dynamic has been so widely accepted that it’s rare that anyone questions the actual reasons behind it. While it’s understandable if someone leaves a non-profit or a government position to take a private-sector job that she should expect a pay raise, why should a person who’s working for one private corporation receive so much less compensation than a person with equal skills working for another private corporation?
This disparity is pretty easy to explain: those working in PR and marketing are much more closely connected to the revenue side of a business, and so it’s much easier for them to discern their worth to a company. Having worked for a few marketing and PR agencies, I’ve often been required to regularly fill out time sheets which tracked my billable hours for each client I worked for. I also knew what the firm billed to the client for my time. Even in cases where we weren’t billing by the hour, I knew what the monthly retainer was, so if we were charging a client $40,000 a month and I was one of three people working on that account, I knew I was producing roughly $13,000 a month in value for the firm. If I worked on an average of three accounts at a time, then some easy back-of-the-envelope math would tell me that I was responsible for $468,000 a year in revenue for my company.
I was also closely tied to the new business pipeline. Every time we had a new prospective client, I was responsible for conducting research and developing a communications plan, and once I reached a certain stage in my career I was also expected to pitch this plan to the potential client.
Compare this to newspaper journalism: I only had a very vague knowledge of what it cost to run an ad in our newspaper. I certainly wasn’t kept up-to-date on the day-to-day goings-on in the advertising department. Several years later, when I worked as an editor at a major national magazine (I briefly left the dark side for about two years), I was never told what our average CPMs were and was given very little access to the business side of the company despite having a good bit of interest in that subject.
Many news companies pride themselves on having a strict separation between their business and editorial divisions; it allows them to maintain editorial integrity and independence, or so they say. But this partitioning places journalists at a distinct disadvantage by keeping them completely in the dark when it comes to revenue. It can be argued that the journalism forms the very backbone of a media company, and the business side would be unable to generate revenue without the editorial staff, but the current setup allows the journalists to be viewed as little more than factory workers, assembling content against which their business counterparts can sell ads.
This is what I think NYU professor Jay Rosen was getting at when he wrote a post explaining “when to quit your journalism job.” In it, he argues that “if you work in any kind of editorial organization, it is your job to understand the business model. If you feel you can’t do that, you should quit.” While I don’t necessarily agree with his prescription — most people don’t have the luxury to just up and quit their jobs — I do agree that reporters are doing themselves an unnecessary disservice by convincing themselves they’re above worrying about the revenue generation that funds their work.
This separation also pushes them in directions away from their core competencies. As Hamilton Nolan detailed in a Gawker essay titled “Against Editors,” reporters who want to advance their careers and escape a life of penury are often forced to take tracks that don’t always necessarily play to their strengths.
Here is the traditional career track for someone employed in journalism: first, you are a writer. If you hang on, and don’t wash out, and manage not to get laid off, and don’t alienate too many people, at some point you will be promoted to an editor position. It is really a two-step career journey, in the writing world. Writing, then editing. You don’t have to accept a promotion to an editing position of course. You don’t have to send your kids to college and pay a mortgage, necessarily. If you want to get regular promotions and raises, you will, for the most part, accept the fact that your path takes you away from writing and into editing, in some form. The number of pure writing positions that offer salaries as high as top editing positions is vanishingly small. Most well-paid writers are celebrities in the writing world. That is how few of them there are.
As Nolan goes on to point out, being a good writer doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good editor, and vice versa. So you have talented reporters who suddenly find themselves editing copy when they’re not really qualified to do so, and in order to justify their higher salary, they must edit with gusto in such a way that doesn’t necessarily improve the original draft. …
All this is not to say that there aren’t downfalls when journalists become too closely involved on the business end. We saw that when a former Vice editor leaked emails from his superiors in which they forced him to suppress negative reporting on Vice’s advertisers. But to distance yourself too far from the revenue generation is to place yourself in a weakened position where you can’t make an informed argument for your worth. Once that worth is realized and you’re able to use it as leverage for a higher salary, suddenly the dark side — where you’ll spend the remainder of your days writing press releases or bland marketing copy — becomes much less alluring.
The sentiment is probably not unique to Packer fans, but Packer fans are convinced Fox announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman hate the Packers.
The reason probably has to do with (1) Aikman’s having been the Cowboys’ quarterback, who engineered all the Packers losses to the Cowboys in the 1990s, and (2) some people’s belief that saying anything negative about your team means they hate your team.
Buck and Aikman will be announcing Sunday’s NFC championship, as they have done all of the Packers’ playoff games since Aaron Rodgers first got the Packers into the playoffs. (Including all four 2010–11 playoff games and the final two must-win home games before those.)
Let’s get this on the record right up front: Joe Buck loves Green Bay.
Fox’s top play-by-play football announcer enjoys coming to Wisconsin, even when the weather is less than hospitable. He respects Packers coach Mike McCarthy. He admires quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
His father, the legendary Jack Buck, was in the broadcast booth at Lambeau Field on that wretchedly, wickedly cold day 47 years ago when the Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game.
“I was indoctrinated in the Ice Bowl and the Packers at a very young age,” Buck said in a telephone interview.
So why do a lot of Packers fans think he has an anti-Green Bay bias?
“It cracks me up,” Buck said. “It’s equal parts funny and frustrating. It’s just baffling to me. I’ve said that McCarthy is the coach I would start a franchise with, and (Rodgers) is the quarterback I would start a franchise with.”
Buck and his partner, analyst Troy Aikman, will call the NFC divisional game between the Packers and Cowboys at 12:05 p.m. Sunday at Lambeau Field.
Aikman, the former Cowboys quarterback, beat the Packers regularly in the 1990s and won three Super Bowls. So maybe there’s some guilt by association?
“I think that’s part of it,” Buck said. “He had success against them. But Aikman feels the same way. Troy loves Aaron.”
Aikman said he took the criticism from Packers fans in stride.
“It’s just the nature of the business,” he said. “It’s not isolated to me or Joe or one crew. There was a petition for Phil Simms not to do Denver games. It’s part of the job. Joe probably said it best: Fans say, ‘We want you to be unbiased,’ but they really don’t. They want you to be biased toward their team.”
Buck gets it, too. He understands that the venom heaped on him in social media by a segment of fans comes with the territory. There’s even a “Joe Buck Sucks” Facebook page.
He isn’t a “homer,” an announcer who is paid by the team and therefore refrains from being critical. But he can’t recall anything he’s said that would make fans think he roots against the Packers or revels in their misfortune.
“I honest to God can’t think of anything critical we ever said except for maybe (kicker) Mason Crosby when he was struggling in 2012,” Buck said. “I think we’re in a different era and some of that stuff gets fanned by social media.
“I mentioned it to McCarthy the last time we were there and he was like, ‘What?’ It is what it is and it’s nothing anybody has lost sleep over.”
Buck said that when he visits Green Bay, people he meets in hotels and restaurants are unfailingly polite.
“When you walk around town,” he said, “people could not be nicer.”
But when he sits in the open-air broadcast booth at Lambeau, fans throw peanuts at him and Aikman and yell things that aren’t fit for print.
“What are you even listening to?” Buck said. “Did you hear my Week 17 call last year, when (Randall) Cobb caught the touchdown pass (that beat the Chicago Bears)? I almost pulled a groin on that call. That was raw emotion coming out.”
I’ll tell you a story: We did the Giants–Patriots Super Bowl in Arizona in 2008. It was a great finish, an unbelievable game. The Patriots trying to go for the undefeated season, the Giants upsetting them. I was staying at a different hotel from the rest of the Fox people and when the game ended I went back to the hotel. I was married at the time and my wife said, “Are we going to go to the [Fox] party?” I said, “No, let’s just go downstairs and grab some dinner.”
I was a little down, to be honest, a little depressed. So we are sitting there having dinner, relaxing, and [ESPN’s] Ron Jaworski comes over. He was eating at the other side of the restaurant. So he says, “Hey, man, what a great game! How about that catch from [David] Tyree!” He’s all excited. I was like, “Yeah, it was good.” He is going on and on and then finally says, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Nothing is wrong.” He said, “Why aren’t you excited? You just called this great game.” I said, “Ron, I didn’t do anything. I’ve played in that game. I won that game. I know what that feels like. All I did was talk about it. I didn’t do anything.” And he walked away and when he did, he gave me this quizzical look. It was like, “What is wrong with this guy?”
So he walks away and I said to my wife: “You know, this may be the greatest game that I ever call. I may have just called the biggest game that I will ever have the opportunity to call in this profession and I could not be more depressed right now.” It shook me up a bit. I thought, “Man, where does the joy come from broadcasting when you have already been the one out there doing it.”
But I will tell you since that time I have not experienced that low again. We did the Super Bowl last year in New York and I could not have felt a greater accomplishment in this business. I don’t know why I am all of sudden getting real satisfaction out of this job, but I am and that has really helped me. The preparation is extensive and I put a lot of time into it, but I enjoy it. As a former player I have a real appreciation for a guy like Aaron Rodgers and how much time he puts into his craft and how good he is doing it. I enjoy the relationships I have with coaches and players. I enjoy the process of getting ready each week. I enjoy my crew. I like the weekends and being at the site of the games, and we get to do great games.
I am so fortunate to have had a career like I had playing — I lived my dream playing in the league — and now to do a job where I get to be around the sport is beyond imagination. The only negative for me is I have my girls [he has two daughters, 12 and 13] and I am gone for six months out of the year. I miss a lot of their activities. I do get to see a lot of them during the week that a lot of dads don’t get to see and then I have six months where I am always there. But being gone on the weekends and missing some important moments in their life is really the only negative.
How did this professional fog lift? And how long did it exist?
You know, I don’t really have a great answer. I never felt it again. Of course it was three years until we did our next Super Bowl, which was the game in Dallas. But I didn’t feel that way after future playoff games. I have not experienced that feeling again and I’m not sure exactly why. I don’t want to say everything was fine the next season, but when we did our next really big game, I didn’t experience it. So because of that, I really have been able to enjoy the profession.
“At the time this was happening, I’ll admit I was thinking everyone wants to take pride in what they do and feel satisfaction and I was thinking, Do I need to go into coaching or something else to experience the highs and lows of winning and losing? That for me is real. You love the winning when you were playing but you just miss having so much invested and then not knowing completely whether we got it done or did not get it done. That’s how I felt in 2008 but I have not felt that way since.
You’ve been a broadcaster since 2001. At what point does a sports broadcaster reach his or her apex and why?
Good question. I feel that last year midseason is when the craft kind of clicked for me. I feel like I have been at my best since midseason last year. The one thing about being an athlete, say you are struggling with throwing a comeback route, well, then you go out and practice it. You throw it 100 times a day and you get better at it, and you see those improvements pretty rapidly. In this business, you don’t get the practice reps. You can’t work on it as much as you like to work on it. Your practice time is live. I find you have to do a lot of evaluating on your own. I’m asking myself, Why is this good? Why does this work? And not everyone agrees with that. We are in a business that does not give a lot of feedback and you just try to be a critic of yourself. Or you ask other people why something is good for them and try to incorporate it into what you are about but still remain authentic.
People who work in regular jobs get quarterly reviews or end of the year evaluations. How does you get your work reviewed?
Fox began a few years ago using an anonymous person to evaluate each broadcast. We also get a report each week — things they liked, things they did not like, things they felt I could have added. Or this was a great anecdote, things like that. It is helpful. But the frustrating thing for this business, and I think everyone experiences it, I use the analogy that when I played, I would be watching a Monday Night game and if Joe Montana threw three interceptions, you would say, “OK, he had a tough day but he is still a helluva quarterback.” In this business, it just seems like really more opinion than anything else. One is only as good as what people think. There is no real measuring stick as there is in athletics. That part of it is frustrating for all us who played competitively and then have gotten into television. But I receive critiques from my bosses each week and the weekly reports.
So how do you view the Dez Bryant play now that a couple of days have passed?
When it happened I did not think for a minute it was not a catch. When it happened, I’m thinking it is an unbelievable catch. Then when we went to break, [Fox rules analyst] Mike Pereira said he thought the call was going to be overruled. I said, “Really? It looks to me like if anything is changed to the call it will be ruled a touchdown.” They ruled it the way Mike saw it. I’m not going to argue with Mike. After the game you hear from all sorts of people about the call and 99 percent of my friends who texted me are just fans and most don’t know the rules. But I did hear from some coaches and that got my attention. And they felt it was a poor call.
The question becomes about the whole football act and that’s why it ultimately was not a catch. If you said Dez made a football move, then it would have been down by contact. Since it was through the process of the catch when the ball was bobbled, then it was incomplete. I trust Mike Pereira and I trust the New York office had the ability to communicate with [referee Gene] Steratore. But I think in general there are way too many discrepancies in our rule book. I have felt for years they should blow the whole thing up and start over and make it simpler. What is a football act? There are just all kind of different exceptions and not just on catches but the rules in general.
Something that’s interesting to me is that I believe Pereira frees up you and Joe not to have to get in-depth about rules decisions. I see that as a positive because broadcasters can get in trouble with rules-based stuff in any sport. But you might view it differently. Does Mike free you up, or do you still feel you have to get an evaluation in?
I don’t feel he necessarily think he frees me up. I think he is great to have and I think everyone has seen the benefit of Fox having Mike Pereira on our network because now everyone has gone with someone like that. And it makes sense. It is great for the viewer. The rulebook is extensive. The league sends a video out every week to the broadcasters on all the various plays that happened the previous week and here is why it was ruled that way. You go back and forth on why things are being called the way they are being called. Mike and I have disagreed on calls. Go back to the NFC Championship Game [Jan. 2010] between the Vikings and Saints. Mike said a hit on Brett Favre should have been roughing the quarterback. I disagreed. I think when you have a call that helps determine the outcome of a game and you are able to go to the guy who was once the head of officiating, it is a great luxury for us to have. But that does not take away from what my job is. So I don’t know that it frees me up. I just think it is a great luxury for us at Fox. …
Do negative comments ever impact your broadcast?
It doesn’t impact me. It really doesn’t. I think it is because I was a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys for 12 years. I have been in the middle of the storm. I have thrown game-losing interceptions and had to deal with that for a week. Whatever is said, such as people saying I am hating on some team, it has no relevance to me.
As an athlete, you were trying to reach the top of your profession both individually and with the Cowboys. How important is it for you to be considered the top NFL analyst on television?
Well, that is what you strive for, that is what I work toward. But I don’t know that you ultimately ever achieve it.
Because it’s subjective?
Right. It’s like saying who is the greatest quarterback of all time? That’s what great about sports. It is a great debate. No one has ever ultimately achieved that unanimously. So if a fair percentage of people regarded me as the best at what I do, that would be a great complement to me and that is what I strive for.
Joe Buck is a strange case. He’s not a polarizing broadcaster with his content yet he draws emotion on both sides, especially from viewers who dislike his work. People always have a definitive opinion of him and, obviously, there are some fan bases that just don’t like him. Have you ever been able to figure out why a guy who is not provocative or a shock jock draws such strong opinions about him?
Yeah, that is a very good question and I don’t know that I have a good answer for you. I have worked with Joe for 13 years and the guy is phenomenal. He is so good at what he does. He simply does not make mistakes and with all that is going on, he just handles everything so effortlessly. I think Joe’s style is that he wants to come across as very casual, but the amount of time that he puts in for preparation is off the charts. He is a play-by-play guy who is not interested in just blending in. He has opinions and he is going to give them and people are going to take notice of him during a broadcast, And that is great. Beyond that, people just like something or they do not. To me, I think it speaks to how great he is, that people immediately have a reaction to Joe Buck. But as far as people viewing him unfavorable because of something he might have said or challenging this particularly fan base, nothing could be further from the truth. He is a great guy, cordial to everyone he comes across. I don’t quite get it and I don’t know if he is impacted by any of it. But there is no one I would rather be working alongside. …
Is there one game that you consider your best sports broadcasting performance?
There is usually two or three broadcasts a year that I come out feeling really, really good about. The game was great, we were really good, it was lively, and we had great conversation. Not that everyone agrees with that [laughs] but that’s how we [Buck and Aikman] assess it or how I assess what I did. But I will say I have never come out of a broadcast and didn’t look back and think I wish I had said something a little differently or pointed something else out. And I was like that as a player. I tend to think I will never have the perfect broadcast but when I am done I do think I will look back at one or two and say this was about as good as it got for me.
Part of this probably has to do with Aikman’s getting the biggest games, as part of Fox’s number one team with Buck. (Who gets complaints as well; Buck is Fox’s number one NFL and baseball play-by-play guy.) Their CBS counterparts, Jim Nantz and Phil Simms (who get complaints of their own — Nantz for being too vanilla, Simms for saying nonsensical things), apparently are setting a sports broadcasting record by announcing their 30th game of the season, the AFC championship, on Sunday.
Whether that’s overexposure depends on whether you like the announcer. Buck is following the path (maybe not by choice) of Curt Gowdy, who was NBC’s number one announcer for football, baseball and most other sports (including the 1972 Winter Olympics) in the 1970s, and Al Michaels, who did the same for ABC in the 1980s.
It’s not easy to be the number one announcers. (Though one of the networks really should give me the opportunity …) In addition to the pervasive commentary about and criticism of the commentators, there is the fact that they have to sort of dumb down their commentary the farther in the playoffs they go, because the last two rounds of the playoffs are viewed by an increasing percentage of casual fans who may watch the playoffs and not much of the regular season. That’s probably why Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated often would rank announcers lower on the network pecking order higher in his announcer ratings, because Dr. Z was a football guy and wanted to hear about such inner details as line play. There will be many viewers of Super Bowl XLIX (carried by NBC in two weeks) who could not care less about the difference between an offensive guard and an offensive tackle, or a safety (the defensive player) vs. a safety (the offense’s ending up in its own end zone.)
But: Does this sound like someone who hates the Packers?
At least Aikman is willing to change his mind if the later evidence contradicts his first opinion.
I like Buck and Aikman (in the former case probably because we’re contemporaries age-wise), but regardless of your opinion, if you are from the ’80s or ’90s you should find this funny:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 