Watching football makes one violent, according to an argument offered by Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski on Tuesday. Brzezinski even relied on the false meme that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday as proof of the validity of her position.
What started as a discussion with advertising executive Donny Deutsch about advertisers boycotting the NFL because of the league's weak response to the domestic violence scandal ended up as a Brzezinski rant about football itself. She compared football players to military members coming home with PTSD, and opined that watching the Super Bowl creates domestic violence.
Brzezinski: What I was saying was not an argument or an excuse for these—men, but it's a game that involves very intense practice and clashing between human beings that happens with audiences cheering and I think people's endorphins, I got to tell you --
Deutsch: Nobody cheering that night. Nobody with pads on.
Brzezinski: Super Bowl Sunday has the highest rate --
Deutsch: We got it; it’s a violent game
Brzezinski: There's something about the game.
Deutsch: But Joe’s analogy about, ‘a guy goes off to war does he come home and kill people’
Brzezinski: Hey Donny, a lot of people come back from war with post-traumatic stress. A lot of people come back from war completely different. Yes, I think being in attack mode changes you as a person. Having your head beat in every day changes you.
Scarborough: It's a game.
Deutsch: Eli Manning doesn't come home and beat his wife.
Brzezinski: You know what, I don’t think those guys when they’re out in the field are looking at it as [making the finger quotation marks gesture] “a little game,” O.K.? They are killing each other. They are bashing each other's heads in. Concussion after concussion, after concussion…
Deutsch: What’s your point?
Brzezinski: That's an issue. I’m just saying, it has to be looked at holistically. It’s not an excuse for the behavior. There's a connection between all this. This is a violent game. And domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday-- we've seen the numbers. Why is that?
The myth-busting website Snopes investigated the claim of extra violence on Super Bowl Sunday and found it false. Apparently the meme began with some pre-big game talk show appearances in 1993 using some apocryphal statistics. The Snopes article concludes:
The weeks and months after the 1993 Super Bowl saw a fair amount of backpedalling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but as usual the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of misinformation. As Sommers concluded, "How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained."
