Nick Wass / AP PhotoDan Snyder has finally broken his silence. The Washington Redskins owner spoke up this afternoon about precisely why he’s decided to send his legal hounds after the Washington City Paper over Dave McKenna’s brilliant “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder.” And you’ll never be able to guess why: it’s because he “loves the media,” duh!
In an interview with Washington Post beat writer Rick Maese today, Snyder claims that he had been “hoping that [Dave McKenna would] apologize, hoping [City Paper would] say sorry…All they had to do was apologize and retract their lies.”
More from Maese’s blog post:
“My father was a journalist,” Snyder said Friday, speaking for the first time publicly since the suit was filed. “And I’ve never sued anybody in the media. And I handle criticism — I mean, I get that all day long. You guys made a living off it. And that’s fine; that’s your job and I respect that. But you can’t call people names, criminals. You can’t make fun of someone’s wife and her effort for breast cancer awareness as national spokesperson for the National Football League as a breast cancer survivor. It’s just wrong.
“What’s wrong is wrong, and this is wrong. And this guy crossed the line. Even if he does any homework, I don’t know him. It’s not personal. This is just an issue where somebody did something flat-out wrong.”
City Paper has continually asserted that McKenna’s reporting was and is solid — an argument which has been investigated and confirmed as accurate. Snyder later elaborated on his thoughts about McKenna during an appearance on The John Thompson Show on ESPN980 radio. “I wouldn’t recognize [McKenna] if I was in an elevator with him….I wish he would apologize to my wife and be more integrity based,” he said, adding, “I love the media, respect the media.”
