ESPN’s Colin Cowherd is a hideous man, full of bluster, arrogance and wrongheadedness–and it’s obvious that he’s a sign of the times in American broadcasting. He creates elaborate, asinine theories and stuffs them full of “facts” that are usually not true. His predictions are almost always wrong. If Cowherd tells you to bet the rent money on something, you best sock it under a mattress. But being wrong and obnoxious has yet to cost him because like most pundits, he’s not in the business of being right. He’s in the business of being loud and of being a brand.
Just one small example: Before the 2012 baseball season, the Texas Rangers let pitcher C.J. Wilson become a free agent, instead opting to invest money in Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish, whom the organization had scouted heavily. Cowherd went on the radio with one of his typical idiotic rants, stating authoritatively that this was an example of how people are attracted to the unknown instead of appreciating what has worked for them, that the team had fallen in love with an ideal instead of understanding what they already had was better, that Wilson would prove to be the superior pitcher. Mark my words, Cowherd said.
He didn’t take into account that Darvish was a young pitcher about to age into his prime and Wilson was older and exiting his. He didn’t pay attention to Darvish having a deeper arsenal of pitches. He didn’t pay attention to reality at all. The Rangers hadn’t fallen in love with an ideal; it was Cowherd who had fallen in love with his moronic theory. I guess I don’t have to add that in the 14 months since Texas made its decision–one based on scouting, data and analysis–Darvish has proven to be one of the best pitchers in MLB while Wilson has faltered badly for his new team. And this isn’t just the exception with Cowherd–it’s the rule.
Cowherd doesn’t limit his foolishness to sports–he also makes gross and insulting generalizations about women and anyone he feels isn’t as successful as he is, though your definition of “successful” may differ. The suits at the sports network are obviously bright enough to realize what a huge douche they have working for them. But they only care about one thing: Can we turn him into a star and make money from his noise?
Of course, this is just a sports guy and sports aren’t important. But the same holds true for media across all areas in this country, especially in our age of dwindling financial returns for traditional platforms. When Jeff Zucker became the new head of CNN, he promised that he would “broaden the definition of what news is.” That remark won him applause from Rupert Murdoch, who has been poisoning the air with non-news and dubious research methods for decades. Murdoch has always believed that news is just another form of entertainment. Perhaps its just a coincidence that CNN and News Corp. properties were fast and first and embarrassingly wrong in the aftermath of the horrendous Boston Marathon carnage.
Proud jughead Joe Scarborough was able to cherry-pick polls that helped him sell dishonest stories in the run-up to the Presidential election, while questioning the integrity of pollster Nate Silver, who stuck to the numbers. The facts didn’t matter.
These aren’t crazy conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones–the single biggest sack of shit in American media–but in some ways their dishonesty is more dangerous. It isn’t cloaked in extremism but in respectability. And there’s nothing respectable about it.
The opening of Colin McGowan’s new article about the cartoonish Cowherd at the Classical:
“This past Friday, Colin Cowherd sat down with Bill Simmons to talk mostly about Colin Cowherd. They also kicked around a few theories about the mutation of LeBron’s competitiveness gene and the link between fascism and food. In tone, the podcast is more or less what one would expect: two hip-shooters a-hip-shootin’, and some excessive mutual admiration—Cowherd talks about Simmons’s perspective and craft as if Simmonsian should join Kafkaesque as an OED-approved literary adjective; Simmons gushes over Cowherd’s ability to… talk to himself for nine minutes at a time. For my part, I cleaned my apartment and occasionally yelled ‘wrong!’ from across the room.
I listened to the interview because I’m not looking to set my brain on fire with intellectual stimulation while drinking gin and scrubbing cat piss out of my bathroom floor on a Friday evening, but also because I wanted to listen to two powerful media figures I dislike talk shop. I think both Cowherd and Simmons, in their own ways, are what’s wrong with sports media, which in turn makes for an increasingly facile and (in Cowherd’s case) needlessly hostile mainstream sports discourse. I’ve called Simmons ‘either a hack or a complete asshole,’ and Cowherd, along with his louder, more malignant cousin Skip Bayless, isn’t in the sports business so much as he’s in the infuriation business. He peddles haughty reductiveness and calls it honesty, then bats around an overmatched simpleton from Steak’s Landing, Wisconsin for a few minutes before returning to his now-basically-show-long rant about Carmelo Anthony’s facial expressions and how, he doesn’t care what you think, he’s gonna go on pronouncing it ‘jih-roh.’
The podcast isn’t uninteresting, which Cowherd might claim is the entire battle. He exclaims at one point ‘What’s wrong with being interesting?’ which is exactly the sort of unassailable bully logic he employs on his radio show. Of course there is obviously nothing wrong with being interesting—what with it being definitionally positive—but here, Cowherd isn’t talking about the Lakers’ playoff chances for the third time in four days or staging overrated/underrated debates about literally anything. He’s talking about himself, and why he is the way he is, what he believes in. This is engaging enough: Colin Cowherd the human being is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. If he wants to talk about what makes him strange, I’ll listen.
What makes him strange—wrong, but also strange—is that he sees a direct correlation between popularity and, if not quite quality, some inherent goodness.”
