WEEI, Barstool, and Children's Private Parts

More than enough has been said at this point about the controversy over BarstoolSports.com posting naked pictures of Tom Brady’s two-year-old son on their website, especially now that Attorney General Martha Coakley and the state police have gotten involved. So I’ll try to keep this brief.

What’s most galling in all of this isn’t so much Barstool and its proprietor David Portnoy, but the holier than thou reaction to the affair on WEEI. Anyone who’s spent 30 seconds on Barstool (and that’s about as long as I can stand to be on the site without getting a headache) knows what it is. Portnoy is a crude shock jock of the Internet age. Fine. Posting those pictures was gross and unnecessary, but you expect that sort of thing from a guy whose website’s editorial mission is to impress horny middle school guys (we explained this more in full a few months ago).

In any case, after the pictures of Brady’s kid went up, WEEI decided to ban Portnoy, who’d been making regular appearances on the Dennis and Callahan Show, from its airwaves. Over Twitter, WEEI Program Director Jason Wolfe wrote, “For those of you who’ve been tweeting at me. No we will not have portnoy on again. What he did was completely irresponsible. It’s not … About whether he was allowed to do it or not. It’s about common decency. And he showed none.”

Deadspin’s A.J. Daulerio wrote about this a couple days ago, and pretty much nailed it:

Crude commentary about a child’s penis is completely unacceptable to WEEI, where Portnoy had been a regular guest on Dennis and Callahan, a chowdah-scented variation of the Skippy and Goatface’s Morning Sports Holocaust on your local AM dial. Let’s remember that Dennis and Callahan once compared inner-city schoolchildren to a gorilla, so it’s not exactly MacNeil/Lehrer to begin with.

There’s no way that when WEEI decided to allow Portnoy on the air, they didn’t know what they were getting. Besides, as Daulerio points out, Dennis and Callahan are already about as contemptible as it gets. For WEEI to act this shocked and appalled now, well, it’s not shocking, but it’s fairly appalling.