Of his experiences with Twitter, ESPN 980 and Yahoo Sports Radio mouthbreather Steve Czaban asks DC Sports Bog’s Dan Steinberg, “why have I invited onto my personal cell phone a little app that delivers hate right to my eyeballs? What kind of idiocy is that?” It would be a less ridiculous question if you could somehow blame the platform for Czaban’s decision to mock the Eagles measured attempts to pay condolences to Andy Reid after the death of his son last summer, but Czaban — obviously fancying himself as some sort of truth-teller — explains his recent Twitter retirement by claiming, “it’s just too dangerous for someone like me.”
“Basically, it’s too damn dangerous for somebody like me,” Czaban said. “Brick-and-mortar companies that pay your salary treat Twitter as if it’s the highest form of communication that can ever be written. And it lacks context. People say you can still be funny, just be careful about what you tweet. Be careful, sure — but you don’t know the way something is going to take off. There’s something very dangerous about the viral nature of Twitter. … And so I just decided, you know, it’s just not worth it.”
And the Shanahan/RGIII episode during the Seattle game seemed to justify his caution. As a longtime advocate of using caution with the rookie quarterback, “I was so stunned and pissed off and just out of my mind, I would have tweeted things about Shanahan that were quite inflammatory,” he said. “But I had vowed off Twitter. So I resisted the urge, the sun came up the next morning, I was on the radio, and I could say what I wanted to say about it with context, with non-verbal cues, with follow-up, with all the nuance of language. You can’t encapsulate something like RGIII’s injury in 140 characters. There are many, many shades and degrees of it, and that’s conveyed through the medium I’m paid to do, which is radio.”
Indeed, Czaban is correct in pointing out there’s all sort of things that might be misinterpreted or taken out of context with a 140 character tweet. As opposed to Czaban’s reasoned, thorough analysis, which as recently as 6 weeks ago included calling a transgendered college basketball player, “it” over the airwaves.
Czaban can use non-verbal cues on the radio?
Well, verbal precision seems not his forte. His firmer command of verbally verbalizing aside, what’s meant by, “longtime advocate of using caution with a rookie quarterback”–which team’s? Washington’s? This year?