Section 215
Fansided

Joe Banner kind of owned the media about their Ray Rice coverage

By Tim Kelly

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Update 10:33 A.M. EST: I normally do updates at the bottom of articles, but with how long the string of tweets was, I figured posting this up top made sense.

Murphy saw the article this morning, and pointed out that I missed a couple tweets at the beginning of the debate–if that’s what you want to call it.

I made the mistake of trying to embed these tweets in the article, while the fight was going on live last night. That’s my mistake. That said, after going back and looking at some of the earlier replies, I see that while Banner went a bit too far in making his point about the NFL getting all the scrutiny about Rice (they deserve that), I still agree with his point about the media turning all the pressure onto the NFL, when they should have shouldered some of the responsibility too.

I still think after reading this, Banner’s point in the debate ended up being that the media needs to look in the mirror about the Rice issue, and I still agree with that. And that wasn’t directed at someone like Murphy, but rather national reporters like Jason LaCanfora, who also took exception with Banner’s early tweets.

Original Article

Former Eagles President Joe Banner, who has seemingly taken over Joel Embiid’s spot as the must-follow Twitterer (I just made that a word) in the Philly sports landscape, chose not to focus , but the mainstream media who afforded the NFL a pass for the original Ray Rice two-game suspension.

That seems like something to the effect of what I’d been saying. There were people on ESPN and Fox that were defending Roger Goodell when there was a public outcry about Rice only getting a two-game suspension, despite a video of him dragging his future wife’s unconscious body through a casino. But then, a video of Rice knocking his wife out surfaces, as if we didn’t already know that had happened, and there is this huge media outcry against Rice and Goodell. ESPN’s Hannah Storm is suddenly a visionary for ripping the NFL for its handing of the Rice case. CBS’ James Brown is all but nominated for an Emmy for stating the obvious about how men can’t hit women and that we need to reevaluate how we treat women.

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But without that second video ever being made public, we’d be getting ready for Rice to play tomorrow. And you can bet that no one in the “holier than thou media” would be going on any of those rants on the league. Why? Because they didn’t want to piss the NFL off. Unfortunately, it took the NFL seemingly losing all of the public’s trust for these companies to set their anchors free to rip the NFL, because ripping the NFL became the cool, profitable thing to do. In that sense, Joe Banner was absolutely right on. Frankly, in just about all of his viral tweets, Banner has been right. It kills me to say that about a man who let Brian Dawkins walk, but I give credit where it is due. David Murphy, who I normally like, was taken back by Banner’s tweets. Banner ripped the national media, and Murphy took that as ripping the local media and tried to somehow twist that as the public was being ripped by Banner and his arrogance.

I’m still waiting to hear exactly what this has to do with the subject at hand.

But we know that the league screwed this up. We know that executives in the Ravens’ organization screwed this up. That’s become an obvious and tired narrative. But how badly the media has screwed this up hasn’t been given enough attention, and that was Banner’s point.

We can debate for hours whether or not the public should be asked to spend large sums of money on stadiums, but I’m not really sure how that became relevant to the subject. Banner was insulting the media, not the public.

In the end, Murphy sent Banner a previous article he had done on Rice, where he called out the public for acting blindsided about the second Rice video. Again, the media does a lot of thinking for the public (unfortunately), so most of that had to do with the media not doing their jobs, which Banner was saying all along. So, Murphy basically spent an entire night debating Banner on a topic that they weren’t that far from agreeing on. Why? Because Ruben Amaro, that’s why.

WIP’s Glen Macnow also took his shots at Banner.

Believe me, I’d love to rip Banner, but doesn’t it feel like we are trying too hard? Banner makes an accurate comment directed at the national media, and members of the Philly media need to take it personally? Let’s at least wait for him to say something questionable about the Eagles before we try to run him off Twitter. I’m actually enjoying seeing stuffy businessman Joe Banner become a loose cannon on Twitter.

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