WEEI Joins the Outrage at the Bruins Doing Business with Barstool

As you’d imagine any time Barstool partners up with a long standing, iconic social institution to spread some happiness to an increasingly joyless world, us sponsoring towels for the Bruins sparked outrage among the easily outraged. This is one of those rare times I’m not going to include links to the articles I’m talking about. Because to do so would be like giving your attention to a homeless guy screaming “Hey, look at what I got!” from an alley. It not only won’t go well for you, you’re just encouraging his behavior.

But you know whom I mean without me even rattling off the list. Deadspin. The Globe. The Herald. For the Win. SB Nation. All getting a case of the vapors, laying their delicate wrists across their pale foreheads and falling on their fainting couches because a fun website and a fun hockey team that share a common audience would do a little cross promotion. The horror. The horror.

But joining them this time, to my surprise, was WEEI. Specifically, Alex Reimer. Who you may remember from such incidents as calling Tom Brady’s impossibly adorable preschool child “an annoying little pissant,” Brady’s subequent hang up and Entercom’s corporate apology:

Look, if this Regina George wants to put us in his Burn Book with phrases like “Barstool’s smuttier exterior” and “distasteful history,” more power to him. I know for a fact WEEI.com’s pageviews are way down since I left to come back to the Stool 2 1/2 years ago, those clicks won’t bait themselves and it’s common knowledge that mentioning us equals an uptick in your pageviews every time it’s tried.

In the words of my mom, the Irish Rose and every teacher I ever had, I’m not so much angry as I am, well, disappointed. Even though I’ve been gone from that dot com for a long time, I still have some emotional attachment to it. Some pride of ownership. Back in the day when I was working there, this kind of hit piece, Ctrl+C’ed from every other anti-Barstool article ever written, would never have seen the light of day. Because it’s a lazy, perfunctory, repetition of all the same old tropes about sexist we are, with not one new thought added.

Granted, there’s the cursory inclusion of quotes from Kasey and Erika denying misogyny at Barstool. But still with the underlying the suggestion that all the women thriving at Barstool, from them to Liz to Kate to Marina to “Chicks in the Office” to “Call Her Daddy,” are all being Handmaid’s Taled into submission. And, by the way, not one mention of how many female employees WEEI has, on air, on their digital or in production. By contrast:

Again, I’m disappointed. This saddens me. Back when I was there, the site stood for something. Good reporting. Original content. Entertaining the readers. Ripping the people who deserve getting ripped. No one would’ve ever tried to pass off an elementary school cafeteria spitball like this as real hit piece. How the mighty have fallen. Now I know how Vince Wilfork felt watching the U. of Miami win six games a year or lose the Russell Athletic Bowl when he used to play for championships.

One last thing, if WEEI has a problem with Barstool’s smutty exterior and distasteful history, they’ve got a funny way of showing it. When they weren’t hiring me away from the Stool in 2014 and offering me a new contract, they were begging Dave to come on, inviting Feitelberg onto their podcasts and trying to poach Carrabis:

But now they’re shocked … shocked! … that the Bruins would dare climb into marketing bed with us. It’s a sad, sad day to be one of their alumni, I can tell you that.