Post by QPR Report on Sept 3, 2009 18:58:32 GMT
The Examiner (USA) Steven Cohen talks about threats, sponsor boycotts, new radio show (Part 1 of 2)
August 27, 9:02 PMBoston Pro Soccer ExaminerL.E. EisenmengerPrevious
On August 21, Steven Cohen stopped production of seven year-old World Soccer Daily (WSD), the nation’s only daily soccer radio show, after he and his family reportedly received death threats and anti-Semitic hate mail.
His wife and young stepdaughters, ages eight and 12, were also threatened by angry fans who objected to his contentious statements about the Hillsborough tragedy where 96 fans died in a stadium accident in 1989.
Cohen is the target of an aggressive boycott of his radio and TV show sponsors and supporters. Earlier this summer, Cohen also lost his position of five years as co-host of the popular Monday TV show Fox Football Fone-In when his annual contract was not renewed.
Cohen is starting a subscription radio show called World Football Daily with similar content, a project that can’t be derailed by sponsor boycotts.
The sad history of Hillsborough has been thoroughly gone over by government, media, and fans with most agreeing it could have been averted with better stadium management and police direction. But Cohen put some of the onus on fans and emotions erupted again, resulting in a potentially career-ending boycott and death threats for the media personality and his family.
Boston Pro Soccer Examiner spoke at length with Cohen last night about the boycott, the threats, and his right to voice his opinion in the media.
We also spoke with Steve Nicol, head coach of the New England Revolution and former Liverpool defender who was on the field at Hillsborough, visited the hospital as fans struggled for life, and attended funerals. Nicol’s own experience with the tragedy is recounted in a moving interview by Andrew Hush, and Nicol made the following statement to Boston Pro Examiner today at Gillette Stadium.
“I certainly don’t agree with what Steven said and he knows that,” said Nicol. “But I certainly don’t agree with any hooligan or any person who’s going to make threats. I haven’t heard them personally, but they’re not good, not right. I wouldn’t even give them the time to talk about it, it’s not helping. I absolutely don’t agree with anybody making any sort of threats to Steven at all.”
“We all say things that are going to upset somebody,” continued Nicol, recently suspended two matches for comments to referees. “We all think that when we say stuff it’s right and sometimes it’s not and sometimes it upsets people, but the way to change it is not by threatening people, absolutely not.”
Interview with Steven Cohen, Part 1
LE: How many listeners did you have on World Soccer Daily?
Cohen: The numbers I was told were in the 300,000 a week range on XM. But for the ranking on iTunes, we were in the top 10 of sports broadcasts, not just soccer broadcasts. And there were over 300,000 people a day downloading it.
LE: How dependent were you on advertising?
Cohen: Very. It was our revenue stream.
LE: How did the situation unravel?
Cohen: I made the comments on April 13, I apologized for any hurt feelings on May 18. It wasn’t enough.
A boycott is when somebody says, ‘I’m boycotting this show because I don’t like the host, I don’t like what he’s saying, and I’m not going to support the sponsors.’ OK, fair enough. But what they did was something much more than that. They went after me personally and they went after every client we had. They bombarded them, they threatened them, and the people that ran the witchhunt will tell you that no one in their group did anything of the sort, but I have the evidence that they did. It was beyond aggressive.
LE: What were their particular complaints?
Cohen: One of the things they took umbrage with was that I said there were ticketless fans there and they didn’t help. The Taylor Report, that they like to cite at every breath, clearly agrees that there were ticketless fans there. There was a riot at a game yesterday in England between West Ham and Millwall and the police are saying that a lot of it had to do with a lot of people showing up at games without tickets.
LE: When I put myself in their shoes, I imagine when people's children, family members, and friends died to watch their favorite football team, some people’s hearts stopped that day. It’s hard to imagine that grief. They probably love and protect the team to honor what their loved ones loved.
Cohen: It’s tragic, but does that mean we should never be able to bring it up? Should we never be able to bring up the Lockerbie air disaster? Should we never be able to bring up the 23 fans that died in a similar event in the Ivory Coast in March? What about 9/11? When do we stop, why can we not talk about it? Why can’t we say, 20 years on, ‘I don’t personally agree with the Taylor Report.’ I think some great things came out of it, no question. But I don’t completely agree with it, much in the same way that I don’t completely agree with the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission.
This has become the third rail of football and a lot of people use it as a stick to beat people with and go completely overboard. Of course it’s tragic for the 96 families, of course. Just like it’s tragic for the 3000-plus families of 9/11 and the 270 families of the people in the Lockerbie plane crash. But if we were in the airline industry, would we be saying, ‘You can’t talk about it, it’s just too painful?’
LE: Have you imagined yourself as the father of the two teenage girls that died?
Cohen: No, I couldn’t possibly put myself in their shoes and I would never want to be in their shoes.
LE: What has been the evolution of your heart since this began?
Cohen: It races a lot faster than it did out of fear. It’s not funny. Something that is so lost in this whole thing is that when we go back to the issue of Hillsborough and 96 fans dying at a football game, of course it is awful and tragic. But 20 years later someone exercised his free speech and some people initiated a witch hunt that has gone from death threats to anti-Semitism back to death threats to threats of kidnapping to threats of harming young children. I sometimes wonder if we’re not simply realizing where home plate is here.
LE: Where is home plate? Why is it important that controversy can be debated in a public forum?
Cohen: Because everything should be able to be debated in a public forum. People should be able to talk about things and if people don’t want to listen they should simply turn the channel, turn it off, not support their sponsors, fair enough. But it’s not being debated, that’s my point. They don’t want a debate on it. They want you to believe what they believe and if you don’t believe it and you have the audacity, temerity, to utter the words publicly they will come after you and they will try to destroy you.
LE: But what is the benefit of debating a heated controversy in a public forum?
Cohen: Each side should be able to get their point out.
LE: So everyone gets their point out, everyone is yelling at each other, then what happens?
Cohen: People should in civilized society simply be able to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.’
Read Part 2 of Boston Pro Soccer Examiner's interview with Steven Cohen, where he discusses mob mentality, tribal allegiances, and American soccer fans, here.
More Links:
The Justice Campaign
Steven Cohen World Soccer Daily broadcast April 23, 2009
We Want Him off the Air
Steven Cohen blames Liverpool fans for Hillsborough disaster
Hillisborough disaster, in memorium with music
www.examiner.com/x-4128-Boston-Pro-Soccer-Examiner~y2009m8d27-Steven-Cohen-talks-about-threats-boycott-of-WSD-and-Fox-Football-FoneIn-sponsors-new-radio-show
Part II
Steven Cohen talks about mob mentality, tribal allegiances, and American soccer fans (Part 2 of 2)
Steven CohenIn Part 1 of Boston Pro Soccer Examiner's interview with Steven Cohen, former co-host of World Soccer Daily radio show and Fox Football Fone-In TV show, we spoke about the death threats and boycott that shut down his US soccer broadcasts.
Today, at 1PM ET, Cohen and co-host Kenny Hassan delivered a 15-minute tease for their new subscription-based radio show and podcast of World Football Daily, which previewed an innovative full-length interactive show scheduled for August 31 at 10AM PST.
To read Part 1 of this exclusive August 26 interview with Steven Cohen, which discusses death threats and sponsor boycotts related to his comments on the Hillsborough tragedy and reveals New England Revolution coach and former Liverpool defender Steve Nicol's response, click here.
Interview with Steven Cohen (Part 2 of 2)
LE: Why are you restructuring World Soccer Daily, an advertiser-based radio show, as World Football Daily, a subscription-based radio show?
Cohen: I’m looking for a way to avoid the witch hunt. I’m certainly not done in what I want to do and I’m not going to let people who are on some sort of personal witch hunt crusade get in the way of what I want to do.
LE: So you won't have to rely on advertisers, so a sponsor boycott wouldn’t really affect you.
Cohen: Right.
LE: Explain the dynamics of this witch hunt.
Cohen: The people who started this witch hunt are still going after the people who were in support of the show. They're not interested in a debate and anyone who does not agree with what they agree with should be disposed with. I’m not kidding, that’s the absolute reality of what we’re talking about. They don’t want an open debate.
The mob mentality is a dangerous thing. There are reasons that people like Adolf Hitler came to power, reasons Osama Bin Laden has so many followers. It’s costing my livelihood for now. There are petitions online and people are being written to on behalf of the show saying they think in modern day America this is the most outrageous thing. People are upset, not just from the show’s perspective, but that this isn’t the America they thought they lived in. They’re upset the boycott couldn’t just stay a boycott, instead it became a witch hunt. As a consequence I made a decision last Thursday night after friends and family were contacted by people, that this wasn’t worth it.
LE: You've read me emails and correspondence and I can't repeat them because of inflammatory language, but what did police say?
Cohen: Law enforcement can’t do certain things unless certain criteria are met. I spoke to many people in law enforcement and what it all came down to was unless somebody said to me or sent me an email that said, ‘I’m coming to kill you with a baseball bat on Tuesday, the 27th of August at noon,” they don’t see it as a threat.
I got many, many correspondence that were just shocking. [repeats several] I arrived on my honeymoon a couple weeks ago in Hawaii and somebody sent me threatening emails and one [reading content] ended, “bye bye for now, see you REAL (sic) soon.” They first came to me and then went to my family and friends and that was enough for me.
LE: How did they contact the children?
Cohen: They got hold of one of them on Facebook and sent them one of those pop-up IMs. They got them then on twitter, they got to some friends of their's. When the oldest girl [12] was contacted she didn’t know what it was about, and when we sat down and talked with them over the weekend and told them what had happened, my youngest step-child [8] said she was really disappointed in me.
I’m kind of disappointed in the mainstream media because we’ve approached the mainstream media and they seem to think that soccer is a fringe sport and it’s not worthy of the general public’s attention.
LE: When did you receive the kidnapping threats?
Cohen: About three or four weeks into it. The comments that made everybody so upset were made on April 13. They were sensationalized by a website [EPLTalk] who ran a headline that said, ‘Steven Cohen Blames Liverpool fans for Hillsborough.’
They didn’t just want me of the air, Mel Abshier who runs the North American branch of the Liverpool supporters clubs made it very clear they wanted me to divest of my own company. He didn’t just want me off the air, his demand was that I had to divest of my own company.
They hide behind their computers and it becomes very easy and they become keyboard warriors and they are the ultimate cowards.
LE: At some point it went into mob mentality, where reason is lost. Then it’s the bandwagon and the pendulum swings with the weight of all the people that jumped on.
Cohen: But it’s not acceptable for the leaders of this witch hunt to then say, ‘We told them not to,’ It was always going to end up that way. If you know anything about football fans from the UK, it was always going to end up in this. Some of the stuff that was posted on message boards was just despicable, absolutely and completely despicable. I could read you a few, someone posting an entire thread about ‘I just wish people who made death threats had the balls to follow them through.’ That’s how it starts, that’s how people get egged on to do terrible, terrible things. Enough people say that and someone says, ‘I’m going to go be the hero.’
It’s dangerous from both sides because the people who supported us on the show were none too pleased with what was going on, although not enough of them knew the severity of what was going on and somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to find somebody, somebody was going to bump into somebody at a pub, and stuff was going to go off because that’s how this ends.
And these people who led this witch hunt now want to distance themselves from what was always going to happen.
LE: How do you convey your sympathy to people who lost loved ones in this tragedy?
Cohen: They're the ones attacking me, they’re the ones who fully endorse this, I have much love for them in terms of the fact that they went through a tragic and gruesome loss, but I’m having trouble in some respect, distinguishing between them. I can’t weed them out because it’s become a mob mentality.
LE: How did your role with Fox Football Fone-In end and what was their position?
Cohen: They never really expressed a position to me. The fall season was still going on in Europe for another six weeks, so they didn’t say very much to me. I was under contract and sometime in the summer they informed me they weren’t going to bring me back. I was always on a one-year deal, they just weren’t going to renew it. It’s ridiculous to think they weren’t affected by it, they must have been, they were getting bombarded by thousands of people saying the most ridiculous things.
At no time have I ever, ever, ever mocked the dead. Never. So what they'd do to curry favor was simply say, ‘He’s mocking the dead, how can you do business with him?' How can you have anything to do with him when people in the thousands start emailing you and saying this guy is mocking the dead?
My view has always been, and it remains so, that I don’t believe anybody went down there to cause mischief that day. But in my opinion, it’s very difficult to agree that in a situation like that, and logic tells me that the fans cannot pretend as if they were not there. I don’t think they went down there to do any mischief, I just think that if you want to blame the police and you want to blame the FA, and for all the talk of wanting justice for the 96 and they’re entitled to want justice for the 96, I don’t think they’ll be any justice for the 96 until everybody looks themselves in the mirror.
LE: I’ve heard it say that you’re making these statements against Liverpool and their fans because you’re a Chelsea supporter.
Cohen: Nothing to do with that. It’s got nothing to do with being a Chelsea supporter.
LE: What is this strong club allegiance?
Cohen: Its tribal, it’s very tribal. It’s handed down. You can’t call these clubs franchises. They started in these little towns where everybody who played for the club were from the town. It’s handed down from generation to generation to generation and occasionally you have splits where an Arsenal fan will become a Tottenham fan for some reason.
One of the things the supporters groups of Liverpool were trying to avoid, was they didn’t want the fresh young ears of ‘newly coming to the game’ soccer fans to have to hear that I didn’t agree with the Taylor Report or I didn’t agree with their version of what happened. And it’s so cynical and so insulting to the American ideal because their attitude ultimately comes down to Americans are too stupid to work it out for themselves or research it themselves, so we need to get this guy off the air because God forbid he’s able to influence any of these stupid Americans.
LE: From your WSD radio show and Fox Football Fone-In, what did you learn from the soccer fans in this country?
Cohen: Over the seven years that I’ve been doing this, I've learned they’re far more sophisticated that people give them credit for, far more sophisticated. They know much more about the game then certainly people in the UK will ever give them credit for. Which is a shame because although I suppose it’s natural, that’s where the game comes from and what’s being talked about here is largely the English game, but the American football fan has become far, far more sophisticated.
www.examiner.com/x-4128-Boston-Pro-Soccer-Examiner~y2009m8d28-Steven-Cohen-talks-about-mob-mentality-tribal-allegiances-and-American-soccer-fans-Part-2-of-2
August 27, 9:02 PMBoston Pro Soccer ExaminerL.E. EisenmengerPrevious
On August 21, Steven Cohen stopped production of seven year-old World Soccer Daily (WSD), the nation’s only daily soccer radio show, after he and his family reportedly received death threats and anti-Semitic hate mail.
His wife and young stepdaughters, ages eight and 12, were also threatened by angry fans who objected to his contentious statements about the Hillsborough tragedy where 96 fans died in a stadium accident in 1989.
Cohen is the target of an aggressive boycott of his radio and TV show sponsors and supporters. Earlier this summer, Cohen also lost his position of five years as co-host of the popular Monday TV show Fox Football Fone-In when his annual contract was not renewed.
Cohen is starting a subscription radio show called World Football Daily with similar content, a project that can’t be derailed by sponsor boycotts.
The sad history of Hillsborough has been thoroughly gone over by government, media, and fans with most agreeing it could have been averted with better stadium management and police direction. But Cohen put some of the onus on fans and emotions erupted again, resulting in a potentially career-ending boycott and death threats for the media personality and his family.
Boston Pro Soccer Examiner spoke at length with Cohen last night about the boycott, the threats, and his right to voice his opinion in the media.
We also spoke with Steve Nicol, head coach of the New England Revolution and former Liverpool defender who was on the field at Hillsborough, visited the hospital as fans struggled for life, and attended funerals. Nicol’s own experience with the tragedy is recounted in a moving interview by Andrew Hush, and Nicol made the following statement to Boston Pro Examiner today at Gillette Stadium.
“I certainly don’t agree with what Steven said and he knows that,” said Nicol. “But I certainly don’t agree with any hooligan or any person who’s going to make threats. I haven’t heard them personally, but they’re not good, not right. I wouldn’t even give them the time to talk about it, it’s not helping. I absolutely don’t agree with anybody making any sort of threats to Steven at all.”
“We all say things that are going to upset somebody,” continued Nicol, recently suspended two matches for comments to referees. “We all think that when we say stuff it’s right and sometimes it’s not and sometimes it upsets people, but the way to change it is not by threatening people, absolutely not.”
Interview with Steven Cohen, Part 1
LE: How many listeners did you have on World Soccer Daily?
Cohen: The numbers I was told were in the 300,000 a week range on XM. But for the ranking on iTunes, we were in the top 10 of sports broadcasts, not just soccer broadcasts. And there were over 300,000 people a day downloading it.
LE: How dependent were you on advertising?
Cohen: Very. It was our revenue stream.
LE: How did the situation unravel?
Cohen: I made the comments on April 13, I apologized for any hurt feelings on May 18. It wasn’t enough.
A boycott is when somebody says, ‘I’m boycotting this show because I don’t like the host, I don’t like what he’s saying, and I’m not going to support the sponsors.’ OK, fair enough. But what they did was something much more than that. They went after me personally and they went after every client we had. They bombarded them, they threatened them, and the people that ran the witchhunt will tell you that no one in their group did anything of the sort, but I have the evidence that they did. It was beyond aggressive.
LE: What were their particular complaints?
Cohen: One of the things they took umbrage with was that I said there were ticketless fans there and they didn’t help. The Taylor Report, that they like to cite at every breath, clearly agrees that there were ticketless fans there. There was a riot at a game yesterday in England between West Ham and Millwall and the police are saying that a lot of it had to do with a lot of people showing up at games without tickets.
LE: When I put myself in their shoes, I imagine when people's children, family members, and friends died to watch their favorite football team, some people’s hearts stopped that day. It’s hard to imagine that grief. They probably love and protect the team to honor what their loved ones loved.
Cohen: It’s tragic, but does that mean we should never be able to bring it up? Should we never be able to bring up the Lockerbie air disaster? Should we never be able to bring up the 23 fans that died in a similar event in the Ivory Coast in March? What about 9/11? When do we stop, why can we not talk about it? Why can’t we say, 20 years on, ‘I don’t personally agree with the Taylor Report.’ I think some great things came out of it, no question. But I don’t completely agree with it, much in the same way that I don’t completely agree with the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission.
This has become the third rail of football and a lot of people use it as a stick to beat people with and go completely overboard. Of course it’s tragic for the 96 families, of course. Just like it’s tragic for the 3000-plus families of 9/11 and the 270 families of the people in the Lockerbie plane crash. But if we were in the airline industry, would we be saying, ‘You can’t talk about it, it’s just too painful?’
LE: Have you imagined yourself as the father of the two teenage girls that died?
Cohen: No, I couldn’t possibly put myself in their shoes and I would never want to be in their shoes.
LE: What has been the evolution of your heart since this began?
Cohen: It races a lot faster than it did out of fear. It’s not funny. Something that is so lost in this whole thing is that when we go back to the issue of Hillsborough and 96 fans dying at a football game, of course it is awful and tragic. But 20 years later someone exercised his free speech and some people initiated a witch hunt that has gone from death threats to anti-Semitism back to death threats to threats of kidnapping to threats of harming young children. I sometimes wonder if we’re not simply realizing where home plate is here.
LE: Where is home plate? Why is it important that controversy can be debated in a public forum?
Cohen: Because everything should be able to be debated in a public forum. People should be able to talk about things and if people don’t want to listen they should simply turn the channel, turn it off, not support their sponsors, fair enough. But it’s not being debated, that’s my point. They don’t want a debate on it. They want you to believe what they believe and if you don’t believe it and you have the audacity, temerity, to utter the words publicly they will come after you and they will try to destroy you.
LE: But what is the benefit of debating a heated controversy in a public forum?
Cohen: Each side should be able to get their point out.
LE: So everyone gets their point out, everyone is yelling at each other, then what happens?
Cohen: People should in civilized society simply be able to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.’
Read Part 2 of Boston Pro Soccer Examiner's interview with Steven Cohen, where he discusses mob mentality, tribal allegiances, and American soccer fans, here.
More Links:
The Justice Campaign
Steven Cohen World Soccer Daily broadcast April 23, 2009
We Want Him off the Air
Steven Cohen blames Liverpool fans for Hillsborough disaster
Hillisborough disaster, in memorium with music
www.examiner.com/x-4128-Boston-Pro-Soccer-Examiner~y2009m8d27-Steven-Cohen-talks-about-threats-boycott-of-WSD-and-Fox-Football-FoneIn-sponsors-new-radio-show
Part II
Steven Cohen talks about mob mentality, tribal allegiances, and American soccer fans (Part 2 of 2)
Steven CohenIn Part 1 of Boston Pro Soccer Examiner's interview with Steven Cohen, former co-host of World Soccer Daily radio show and Fox Football Fone-In TV show, we spoke about the death threats and boycott that shut down his US soccer broadcasts.
Today, at 1PM ET, Cohen and co-host Kenny Hassan delivered a 15-minute tease for their new subscription-based radio show and podcast of World Football Daily, which previewed an innovative full-length interactive show scheduled for August 31 at 10AM PST.
To read Part 1 of this exclusive August 26 interview with Steven Cohen, which discusses death threats and sponsor boycotts related to his comments on the Hillsborough tragedy and reveals New England Revolution coach and former Liverpool defender Steve Nicol's response, click here.
Interview with Steven Cohen (Part 2 of 2)
LE: Why are you restructuring World Soccer Daily, an advertiser-based radio show, as World Football Daily, a subscription-based radio show?
Cohen: I’m looking for a way to avoid the witch hunt. I’m certainly not done in what I want to do and I’m not going to let people who are on some sort of personal witch hunt crusade get in the way of what I want to do.
LE: So you won't have to rely on advertisers, so a sponsor boycott wouldn’t really affect you.
Cohen: Right.
LE: Explain the dynamics of this witch hunt.
Cohen: The people who started this witch hunt are still going after the people who were in support of the show. They're not interested in a debate and anyone who does not agree with what they agree with should be disposed with. I’m not kidding, that’s the absolute reality of what we’re talking about. They don’t want an open debate.
The mob mentality is a dangerous thing. There are reasons that people like Adolf Hitler came to power, reasons Osama Bin Laden has so many followers. It’s costing my livelihood for now. There are petitions online and people are being written to on behalf of the show saying they think in modern day America this is the most outrageous thing. People are upset, not just from the show’s perspective, but that this isn’t the America they thought they lived in. They’re upset the boycott couldn’t just stay a boycott, instead it became a witch hunt. As a consequence I made a decision last Thursday night after friends and family were contacted by people, that this wasn’t worth it.
LE: You've read me emails and correspondence and I can't repeat them because of inflammatory language, but what did police say?
Cohen: Law enforcement can’t do certain things unless certain criteria are met. I spoke to many people in law enforcement and what it all came down to was unless somebody said to me or sent me an email that said, ‘I’m coming to kill you with a baseball bat on Tuesday, the 27th of August at noon,” they don’t see it as a threat.
I got many, many correspondence that were just shocking. [repeats several] I arrived on my honeymoon a couple weeks ago in Hawaii and somebody sent me threatening emails and one [reading content] ended, “bye bye for now, see you REAL (sic) soon.” They first came to me and then went to my family and friends and that was enough for me.
LE: How did they contact the children?
Cohen: They got hold of one of them on Facebook and sent them one of those pop-up IMs. They got them then on twitter, they got to some friends of their's. When the oldest girl [12] was contacted she didn’t know what it was about, and when we sat down and talked with them over the weekend and told them what had happened, my youngest step-child [8] said she was really disappointed in me.
I’m kind of disappointed in the mainstream media because we’ve approached the mainstream media and they seem to think that soccer is a fringe sport and it’s not worthy of the general public’s attention.
LE: When did you receive the kidnapping threats?
Cohen: About three or four weeks into it. The comments that made everybody so upset were made on April 13. They were sensationalized by a website [EPLTalk] who ran a headline that said, ‘Steven Cohen Blames Liverpool fans for Hillsborough.’
They didn’t just want me of the air, Mel Abshier who runs the North American branch of the Liverpool supporters clubs made it very clear they wanted me to divest of my own company. He didn’t just want me off the air, his demand was that I had to divest of my own company.
They hide behind their computers and it becomes very easy and they become keyboard warriors and they are the ultimate cowards.
LE: At some point it went into mob mentality, where reason is lost. Then it’s the bandwagon and the pendulum swings with the weight of all the people that jumped on.
Cohen: But it’s not acceptable for the leaders of this witch hunt to then say, ‘We told them not to,’ It was always going to end up that way. If you know anything about football fans from the UK, it was always going to end up in this. Some of the stuff that was posted on message boards was just despicable, absolutely and completely despicable. I could read you a few, someone posting an entire thread about ‘I just wish people who made death threats had the balls to follow them through.’ That’s how it starts, that’s how people get egged on to do terrible, terrible things. Enough people say that and someone says, ‘I’m going to go be the hero.’
It’s dangerous from both sides because the people who supported us on the show were none too pleased with what was going on, although not enough of them knew the severity of what was going on and somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to find somebody, somebody was going to bump into somebody at a pub, and stuff was going to go off because that’s how this ends.
And these people who led this witch hunt now want to distance themselves from what was always going to happen.
LE: How do you convey your sympathy to people who lost loved ones in this tragedy?
Cohen: They're the ones attacking me, they’re the ones who fully endorse this, I have much love for them in terms of the fact that they went through a tragic and gruesome loss, but I’m having trouble in some respect, distinguishing between them. I can’t weed them out because it’s become a mob mentality.
LE: How did your role with Fox Football Fone-In end and what was their position?
Cohen: They never really expressed a position to me. The fall season was still going on in Europe for another six weeks, so they didn’t say very much to me. I was under contract and sometime in the summer they informed me they weren’t going to bring me back. I was always on a one-year deal, they just weren’t going to renew it. It’s ridiculous to think they weren’t affected by it, they must have been, they were getting bombarded by thousands of people saying the most ridiculous things.
At no time have I ever, ever, ever mocked the dead. Never. So what they'd do to curry favor was simply say, ‘He’s mocking the dead, how can you do business with him?' How can you have anything to do with him when people in the thousands start emailing you and saying this guy is mocking the dead?
My view has always been, and it remains so, that I don’t believe anybody went down there to cause mischief that day. But in my opinion, it’s very difficult to agree that in a situation like that, and logic tells me that the fans cannot pretend as if they were not there. I don’t think they went down there to do any mischief, I just think that if you want to blame the police and you want to blame the FA, and for all the talk of wanting justice for the 96 and they’re entitled to want justice for the 96, I don’t think they’ll be any justice for the 96 until everybody looks themselves in the mirror.
LE: I’ve heard it say that you’re making these statements against Liverpool and their fans because you’re a Chelsea supporter.
Cohen: Nothing to do with that. It’s got nothing to do with being a Chelsea supporter.
LE: What is this strong club allegiance?
Cohen: Its tribal, it’s very tribal. It’s handed down. You can’t call these clubs franchises. They started in these little towns where everybody who played for the club were from the town. It’s handed down from generation to generation to generation and occasionally you have splits where an Arsenal fan will become a Tottenham fan for some reason.
One of the things the supporters groups of Liverpool were trying to avoid, was they didn’t want the fresh young ears of ‘newly coming to the game’ soccer fans to have to hear that I didn’t agree with the Taylor Report or I didn’t agree with their version of what happened. And it’s so cynical and so insulting to the American ideal because their attitude ultimately comes down to Americans are too stupid to work it out for themselves or research it themselves, so we need to get this guy off the air because God forbid he’s able to influence any of these stupid Americans.
LE: From your WSD radio show and Fox Football Fone-In, what did you learn from the soccer fans in this country?
Cohen: Over the seven years that I’ve been doing this, I've learned they’re far more sophisticated that people give them credit for, far more sophisticated. They know much more about the game then certainly people in the UK will ever give them credit for. Which is a shame because although I suppose it’s natural, that’s where the game comes from and what’s being talked about here is largely the English game, but the American football fan has become far, far more sophisticated.
www.examiner.com/x-4128-Boston-Pro-Soccer-Examiner~y2009m8d28-Steven-Cohen-talks-about-mob-mentality-tribal-allegiances-and-American-soccer-fans-Part-2-of-2
