backed up Pearlman on his show<\/a>, saying Strahan, who is also an NFL analyst for Fox, owed it to the audience and the sports world to address the \u201celephant in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cMichael Strahan has a responsibility in that instance to ask some sort of football-related question, and he did not do it,\u201d Le Batard said. \u201cIt\u2019s just too uncomfortable. You just can\u2019t enjoy that thing the way you do \u2026 when these guys are limping through their retirement homes to an early death.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026 The reason Chris Johnson is being interviewed is because this is a former athlete of some name. They\u2019re not interviewing random people with ALS, they\u2019re interviewing this person. And so to neglect that question is an omission that I don\u2019t know why the omission is there. And I\u2019m curious. And if you ask the question, you remove the hole in your interview by just asking a question, if football had something to do with this.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday, Le Batard had Pearlman on his show, and the two continued the discussion about why they felt it was so important to take the NFL and NFL media to task over this topic.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cDan, you and I were brought up as journalists in a decreasingly less journalistic age,\u201d said Pearlman. \u201cAnd to me, if you have a football player who is coming to say he has ALS, and there was a study just a couple years ago from Boston University and Harvard saying that NFL players are 4 times more likely to get ALS than [the] general population, to not ask anything about it. And not just that, Dan, they also had an expert on ALS on the same segment and didn\u2019t ask her about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cNumber one, it doesn\u2019t make any sense. And number two, it\u2019s just inexcusably bad journalism. And number three, it speaks to the power of the NFL, the power of The Shield. Let\u2019s keep as far away from this connection as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n
Le Batard then pressed Pearlman on the criticism that a more stringent journalistic focus on the NFL-ALS connection wasn\u2019t relevant to that interview, which the former Sports Illustrated writer strongly pushed back against.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t agree with that at all. It actually bothers me,\u201d Pearlman said. \u201cThe NFL doesn\u2019t want people to think about the negative impacts. Of football on the human body. They want us to cheer and love the shiny helmets and go to the games and buy our $15 pretzels. They want you to be happy watching football.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a reason the NFL never has a CTE Awareness Day. Never paints on the end zone: CTE awareness [or] ALS awareness. They don\u2019t want you aware of it. So when people come along and say, \u2018how dare you ask these questions, how can you ask these insensitive questions?\u2019 Journalists do ask insensitive questions. It\u2019s sort of part of the job. And number two, to not ask it, to not bring it up, to not even mention it is basically going along with the entire NFL narrative that they want you to do. And neither you nor I are paid by the NFL.\u201d<\/p>\n
Le Batard then ran down several criticisms of their stances from social media, in which they were referred to as \u201cghoulish\u201d for wanting tougher questions and admissions around the Chris Johnson interview.<\/p>\n
Pearlman said it would have been fair and reasonable for Strahan to ask Johnson whether he would let his children play football, given his condition and what is known about the connection. He also added that he feels the criticism stems from fans and other media members wanting to enjoy football without having to deal with the ugly consequences that come with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want to be comfortable watching their sports. All those people on Twitter, they want to be comfortable watching. So I\u2019m going to do the ALS challenge. Look, here\u2019s a bucket on my head. I\u2019m challenging my friend to do it now, my other friend to do it. And the intentions are good \u2026 But at some point, someone has to address the ties between this and this. And do I think that would have been enough of a question? No, but at least it would have been a question.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen did we become so soft of a culture that we\u2019re not allowed to ask questions anymore? That it\u2019s never the right time \u2026 it just honestly, again, journalistically, it drives me crazy. And this is why I\u2019m not on Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Le Batard agreed with Pearlman, saying that the direction of modern sports journalism breaks his heart.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople don\u2019t care about this stuff the way that you and I do,\u201d Le Batard said. \u201cThey don\u2019t think about the things that go into the vetting of properly asked questions or information or the lawyering of stories. And in that, the distaste for journalism grows and journalism dies. So you and I are fighting what is empirically a losing fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Pearlman returned to the idea that tough questions like the ones he and Le Batard are asking aren\u2019t just something corporate media isn\u2019t interested in; they\u2019re also something many NFL fans aren\u2019t interested in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people really want to love the NFL,\u201d said Pearlman. \u201cThey really want to love their teams. They really want to sit on their couch and watch so-and-so run for so-and-so yards and wear their jersey that they bought at the NFL shop for $120 and wear their hat that they paid $50 for. And feel very, very, very comfortable.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the more people are reminded that football takes a significant toll on the lives of these players, the less comfortable they are sitting on their couch wearing their $120 jersey, wearing their $50 hat, drinking their beer, cheering on their team.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201c\u2026 Chris Johnson is dying and he showed up on Good Morning America to tell his story, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":778226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[9938,64,63,251746,368771,313673,40111,593,85,368772],"class_list":["post-778225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-als","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-chris-johnson","tag-dan-le-batard","tag-jeff-pearlman","tag-michael-strahan","tag-nfl","tag-sports","tag-the-dan-le-batard-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}