ESPN personality Pat McAfee took a giant swing at the assembled media at the end of ESPN’s annual media day, including shots at The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and Awful Announcing, over perceived mischaracterizations of him and The Pat McAfee Show.
The former Indianapolis Colts punter also didn’t appreciate a question from CNBC’s Alex Sherman, who asked if he had discussions with his peers about “journalistic standards” since joining ESPN.
Sitting on a panel with Scott Van Pelt, Stephen A. Smith, Elle Duncan, and Mike Greenberg, the tempered discussion began to go off the rails just after the 55-minute mark with Sherman’s question about standards.
After first challenging Sherman on his definition of standards, McAfee said, “Sports media has never been wrong before? Did we have doctors on set during all of COVID on ESPN? How did that all go? So whenever you talk about these journalistic standards, was that at journalism school…we break news I think every other day on our show that would be nowhere else. Is that journalism, getting people to open up and chit-chat and talk and expand about who they are, is that journalism, interviewing people that never talked anywhere? Is that journalism?”
McAfee has been criticized for giving an unchecked platform to Aaron Rodgers to talk about his controversial COVID-19 views as well as other comments that have caused headaches for Disney. Brett Favre also sued McAfee for defamation over comments he made about the former quarterback’s ties to a Mississippi welfare fund scandal. Favre dropped the suit after McAfee clarified his comments on air.
After his CNBC response, McAfee was just getting warmed up. Ten minutes later, Marchand asked him what he thought people’s biggest mischaracterizations of him might be. McAfee went right after the former New York Post reporter whom he has referred to as a “rat” in the past.
“Because you made a lot of my life hell for a bit with the things that you reported, how you were reporting, what you were saying, and your source at the time was kept out of the conversation for purpose because of everything that you were kind of going to do,” he said, seemingly referring to former ESPN executive Norby Williamson, who McAfee also called a “rat” on his show. “So I just think an image was painted of me through a lot of different mischaracterizations and misrepresentations of what our show is…And sometimes we might be the worst people on TV, and we’re going to try not to be that going forward.
“But I think mostly that, and there’s a lot of people that maybe have never seen my show, but all they’ve seen is the clips that have been taken out of context and put out, and then it’s back-to-back times, back to back times, and then all of a sudden, that’s who I am… and they’re never going to watch the show. And it’s like I want more people to watch the show. I want more people to watch sports. I want more people to be invested in what we have going on in ESPN.
“And just felt like there was kind of a calculated attack seemingly taking place on me and my show because of how different we are, because of the journalistic standards that we don’t adhere to. We have no journalism school people on staff. I did not do anything with an agent. I negotiated the deal myself. So those are two powerful groups that potentially were cut out of my operation completely….A lot of legitimate people I had a lot of respect for before this whole thing started kind of just made me look like a complete asshole.”
He then criticized Awful Announcing for, in his view, instances of mischaracterization and misuse of footage from his program.
“You can certainly paint me and my guys as terrible people. And I think that was happening for a lot of people as they were getting a lot of clicks,” said McAfee. “I mean, Awful Announcing is in here somewhere. I don’t know who you are, but like, man, future earnings with, like slander, libel, character assassination, stolen clips, all that shit. Like, if I wanted to ever deal with suits, which I don’t, and everybody knows that that could be a thing, like I can make that all the thing.”
McAfee made similar comments about Awful Announcing on his show on Monday.
The former NFL punter ended the day with a plea for understanding.
“But also, I wanted to come here and just like, say to you, like, I understand that you had a lot of reasons to potentially hate me…(that are) misguided. I would appreciate it if you gave me, my guys a chance,” he said. “I think we’re helping out sports media as a whole in the future. I think we’re going to get some things wrong, and we certainly apologize for that. But whenever you’re like lifting our shit and like trying to kill us, like it’s just, I think it’s journalistic standards. I think it is certainly problematic. So that’s where I lie. That’s how I feel. And the reason why I wanted to come is to hopefully, kind of share that message that like we want to be good for sports in sports media. We want to build sports and we appreciate it if you just gave us a fair shot.”
ESPN declined comment on the matter.
At one point, Duncan tried to defend McAfee by saying there are different standards for shows like his and news reporters. Her defense seemed to be that he was not a real journalist and shouldn’t be expected to be one.
“One of those practices that I learned in J-school was that you’re not supposed to have opinions at all, and that’s very antithetical to what most of the sports media is at this point,” she said. “So, and there are people that balance it very well, but I just, I think it’s unfair sometimes that we sort of expect for him to conduct himself the same exact way that we would, you know, ask an Edward R Murrow Award winner to conduct himself like…we have all types here, and that’s the beautiful part about ESPN.”
McAfee visibly shook his head in disagreement during Duncan’s comments.