Opinion The Media's Absurd NFL Hysteria

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Over the past few weeks, two sets of initials have dominated the news — ISIL and NFL — and the casual listener would be hard-pressed to decide which is more odious.

It’s a wonder that President Barack Obama didn’t include a passage in his speech to the nation last week pledging to bring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to justice.


Such is the weight the press has put on the NFL’s punishment of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for punching his then-fiancée that Denis McDonough, the president’s chief of staff, had to weigh in on “Meet the Press”: “I think we all know that Ray Rice being suspended indefinitely seems to be exactly the right thing.”

On the NFL, the media has lost its collective mind. It’s as if the people who controlled CNN’s programming in the aftermath of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 have been put in charge of all press coverage of the NFL, and brought to the task the same sense of proportion, good taste and dignity that characterized the network’s handling of the missing plane.

The coverage of the Rice elevator video managed to combine moralistic preening with voyeuristic pandering. Everyone on TV professed to be so outraged by domestic violence that they had to show a clip of a woman getting viciously punched, over and over again (until many of the networks finally recoiled from their own overkill).

At least the NFL gets its ratings by broadcasting images of men hitting other men.

In recent weeks, you’d think that the fate of justice in America depends on how harshly the NFL punishes a few miscreants. Only if Ray Rice and accused child-abuser Adrian Peterson are banished from the game do women and children have a chance of living in a country where they are safe from violence and abuse.

This is patently absurd. Even if the NFL is spectacularly successful, it is still just a sports league. More specifically, it is a business that stages violent spectacles that will damage the brains of some significant portion of its participants. We really shouldn’t be expecting it to set our society’s standards.

No matter how many sermonettes we hear to the contrary, the NFL is not the key to fighting domestic violence. In fact, it has no connection to it whatsoever. Domestic violence declined 63 percent from 1994 to 2012, according to the Justice

Department — even though the NFL had a lenient policy toward domestic abusers across this period.

Nor is the NFL the sink of criminality you might assume by reading the headlines. Crunching the numbers, Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight writes, “arrest rates among NFL players are quite low compared to national averages for men in their age range.” (Although domestic violence accounts for a disproportionate share of the arrests for violent crimes, according to Morris.)

Still, the NFL has been flailing in the face of the media onslaught. The NFL Network and CBS pulled a Rihanna song from their “Thursday Night Football” broadcast, apparently on the principle that they care so much about domestic violence that they don’t want to be associated with a victim of it.

It is certainly true that Ray Rice should have gotten more than the initial two-game suspension for his shocking assault on Janay, and the NFL needs a clear, certain policy for punishment for such offenses beyond Roger Goodell’s say-so.

This should be fodder for robust debate on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption.” Soul-searching analysis on “The Sports Reporters.” In-depth reportage on “Between the Lines.” In short, it should occupy every sports journalist eager to validate his or her seriousness by delving into political and social commentary (which is to say, most of them).

It shouldn’t be a dominant news story across all media — for weeks.

Almost no one has stopped to think of the effect the vortex of outrage has had on the victim, Janay, who married Rice after the incident.

She not only got punched but gets to see that horrible night replayed everywhere, to hear people bray for the end of her husband’s career and to receive lectures from people who presume to know what’s best for her and her marriage. Like New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who excoriated her for “behaving as such a bad example for all brutalized women.”

Now, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson is the new focus of outrage. Facing child-abuse charges for disciplining his son with a stick, he is taken as a symbol of the noxiousness of all corporal punishment.

This is all so wildly disproportionate that perhaps something more than the usual ax-grinding, ratings-chase and group-think is at work. It may be that these cases are convenient ways to express a deeper discomfort with the NFL, which sacrifices men’s bodies and minds for our viewing pleasure every week.

That, of course, is something in which everyone who enjoys football is implicated and isn’t such a ready subject for table-thumping condemnations.