Perhaps it was unfair to point both barrels of the flamethrower of white-hot righteous indignation at Dan Snyder yesterday, just because a critic of his football team had a radio show canceled on the radio station Snyder owns.
After all, some of the blame, it appears, should go to team president Bruce Allen.
According to Washington Post media writer Paul Fahri, Allen was the driving force behind cancelling the “Man Cave,” the show hosted by former Washington Post beat writer Jason Reid.
Citing sources within Snyder-owned ESPN 980, the report says Allen “has been a key player in the events that buried” the show.
The nature of the disagreement between Allen and Reid is easy. Allen presided over a bad football team, and Reid was the man sent to chronicle it for the largest newspaper in town. The two aren’t meant to be pals.
But Allen was a frequent target of some of Reid’s sharpest barbs, such as after a loss to the Giants which dropped them to 3-11, prompting Reid to write: “The good news is that their embarrassing season is almost finished. The bad news is that President and General Manager Bruce Allen remains on the job.”
After the season, Reid wrote that the team “will remain on the wrong path as long as Allen is in charge.”
So, there’s that.
But the idea that Reid was going to have a show on Snyder’s station couldn’t have been a surprise. They’ve been promoting it for nearly a month. Reid left his job at the Post to work there, and write part-time columns for ESPN.com.
In hindsight, there’s a certain frog-and-scorprion quality at play here, as tying your mortgage payment to someone you’ve ripped on a regular basis might not have been the best career move for Reid.
But it remains heavy handed and petty (though unsurprising) by Snyder, to take one of your harshest critics off the beat with the promise of a job, only to yank it away at the last moment.
