Don Van Natta Jr.
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Don Van Natta Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out · What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr. · 7 Feb 2025
podcast
The first Pulitzer was a public service Pulitzer, actually at the Miami Herald. It was covering Hurricane Andrew, the eye of the storm. I was in Florida City and 165 mile an hour winds were whipping around us in a Comfort Inn motel, which got torn apart. And I wrote a first person story on a Trash 80, one of these little Texas instrument computers about what it was like to survive the storm.
That got the New York Times' attention, got recruited there at the age of 30, and won two Pulitzers there, team Pulitzers, for explanatory journalism about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York.
That's right. I always say that covering the CIA, the Pentagon, trying to get secrets out of there prepared me for covering the National Football League.
I remember that quote vividly. The NFL, you could argue, has been quite greedy since then. Quite hoggy. Quite hoggy. And all of the metrics are moving in the right direction from ratings to team valuations, which are maybe the most important to owners. But yeah, absolutely. 10 years later, Mark got that one wrong.
And they're going to surpass it.
Absolutely. It's the communal viewing aspect of the National Football League, right? Why do the ratings on Christmas Day and Thanksgiving skyrocket? Is everybody hanging on every play and every commercial? No. The game is on because as we gather, that is what we can all agree on is the National Football League. And it's the sweet spot in the American culture.
Yes.
Excellent question. It's a mixture. Certainly, they had somebody like Joe Lockhart, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration, come in and help with crisis communications. He got them through those very tough Colin Kaepernick stories. I know because I talked to him often during that period. They have had help from very smart people on the crisis communications side.
But also, don't underestimate Roger Goodell. Roger Goodell, he often talks about protecting the shield. That's what he always wants to do. Roger Goodell's job is to be the shield for the owners. And he has done that job magnificently. I still remember Pablo during the Ray Rice scandal. And I was on that day in and day out on Outside the Lines with Bob Lee.
It felt several days a week talking about every development. Right. Roger was not truthful in that autumn. And I still remember the press conference where Roger looked like a deer in the headlights.
No. He was hanging on it, looked at that moment by his fingernails for his job with the way he had mishandled this domestic violence case that became a major national story for weeks. And that's all anybody was talking about during the 2014 season. Correct. And he took every one of those arrows. Nobody talked or very few people.
We did a story that raised questions about the Ravens handling of it and the owner, Steve Bishotti. Yes. But Steve Bishotti took very few arrows. Why? Because Roger took them all. And I know after the fact, after that story, talking to owners, they were proud of Roger. He did what he was hired to do. Why?
Because another slate of games are coming on Sunday or Thursday night, and Americans love their football. DeMora Smith, the former National Football League Players Association executive director said, I'll never forget it because he said it to me over lunch. He said, Americans are addicted to football like it's crack cocaine. And he just said it like it's just a fact.
And it was said actually around that time, Pablo, come to think about 2015, 2016, it was after the Ray Rice autumn.
Yes.
Absolutely. It's bread and circuses. It's even the ugly side of the game. Concussions. You know, what happened at Tua. Yeah. Think of the conversation. This season. Right. That weirdly, though, still enhances the appeal. It is the test of this sort of macro question of all of these scandals didn't stop the juggernaut of the NFL. And will this? Probably not.
These guys are not, and I say guys because most of the owners are men, are not smart enough to pull off massive conspiracies. I mean, there's just a lot of groupthink when it comes down to it. I mean, look, the National Football League, they call themselves the membership, right? The 32 owners. They're the membership.
It is the hardest and arguably the most gilded club in America. Yes. Hardest to get into.
Absolutely. No doubt about it. However, at its essence, it's really just a trade association of 31 owners and the Green Bay Packers who— Whose ownership is, yes, more democratically oriented. That's exactly—that's right.
But really, they're— They have massive egos, most of these people. They don't like each other.
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