Cohen is out

[Guest alscarface]

Some info for those that dont know.

 

Where the story broke :-

 

Profile - USATODAY.com

 

 

 

 

The LFCNY applauds Fox Soccer Channel and Chelsea FC.

 

New York, Wednesday 29th July 2009 – In a stunning rebuke and continuation of his isolation from the football world, Fox Soccer Channel (FSC) today announced that Steven Cohen would not be returning to host the FSC show Fox Football Fone In (FFF) which he has co-hosted for 4 years. Just last week, Chelsea FC, the club Steven Cohen nominally supports, also rebuked him saying, “[h]e is not a representative, nor ever has been a representative of the club. We have some 90 million fans worldwide and cannot account for every fan’s opinion.”

 

Steven Cohen chose to lie and smear the 96 Liverpool fans who died tragically at Hillsborough in 1989, seeing their deaths as a way to boost his ratings by denigrating them. Steven Cohen now finds himself in the position of being rejected by those in football whose opinions matter. The LFCNY applauds FSC for its position not to re-instate Steven Cohen as co-host of FFF and we thank Chelsea FC for honoring the memory of 96 of our fellow fans. While we may not support Chelsea FC on the field of play, we recognize that they understand that there are some things that are bigger than partisan loyalties and we sincerely thank them for their position.

 

FSC, like many others in the football world have realized just how toxic Steven Cohen and his odious lies are. Some of the biggest advertisers in the game - Heineken, FourFourTwo – have pulled their support of him and now FSC, the biggest broadcaster of soccer in the USA has done the same. Steven Cohen no longer will have a platform to cross-promote his World Soccer Daily advertisers on FFF. Advertisers and supporters, large and small, are seeing Steven Cohen for what he is, a merchant of hate. They are choosing not to be associated with him, not to give him their money to deride the deaths of 96 football fans in their name.

 

Steven Cohen has lost the support of his own team, Chelsea FC, his broadcast partner, FSC and over 50 percent of his original sponsors. The LFCNY recognizes that all these decisions were not taken lightly and we thank all. This week we particularly thank FSC and Chelsea FC. Next week, we look forward to thanking more sponsors and supporters who will leave Steven Cohen because of his lies and hate.

 

The LFCNY and so many Liverpool fans across North America and the world over have worked tirelessly to get to this point, but the battle is far from over. Steven Cohen has been removed from TV. He now must be removed from satellite radio and we call on Sirius/XM to follow the lead of FSC to cancel its contract with him.

 

There are 96 families on Merseyside who do not deserve to have to suffer the lies and hatred of Steven Cohen anymore.

 

Conor Brennan,VP LFCNY.http://www.lfcny.org.Co-ordinator of the LFCNY campaign against Steven Cohen.

 

 

 

 

 

A few more articles :-

 

 

FSC replaces outspoken Steven Cohen with outspoken Eric Wynalda - Soccer: Extra Time

 

Soccer Insider - The Return of Wynalda

 

Chelsea disown 'fan' Cohen over Hillsborough lies > Local News > News | Click Liverpool

 

Fox Axes Host in Ad Boycott Over Soccer Stadium Deaths | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET

 

Fox Dimisses Steven Cohen From Football Fone-In | World Soccer Reader

 

 

 

And a good response :-

Q&A: Inside the Ad Boycott of Fox Host Steven Cohen | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET

[Stu Monty]

The Fox channel itself is far worse than anything Cohen individually could ever be.

[Liverpool lad]

If Cohen didn't like Liverpool fans before, he is definitely not going to like them now. Good work on the part of everyone involved, hopefully this will serve as a lesson to those people who think they are edgy but they are really cunts

[BatChainPuller]

Fantastic - superb work by the US reds - people power.

[Lunatic]

Fuckin brilliant news! Well done to all involved!

[dirty_sanchez]

Youse are all fucking racists. You're all hating on Cohen because he's a jew.

 

Or something.

 

And by Jew I mean cock smoking imbecile.

[Acid]

Well done should go out to Chelsea for getting behind us too, that must have hurt the twat a far lot more than the death threats from people on another continent.

[OmarVizquel]

Here's a rather lengthy article from an American soccer site written in response to comments posted under an earlier article about Cohen's firing. It's an interesting read written by a fellow football/soccer fan on the other side of the Atlantic. Not sure if the author is an LFC supporter, but he seems to have a fair stance about the whole thing:

 

Why I think Hillsborough still matters - Dan Loney Blog - Soccer Blog - BigSoccer

Why I Think Hillsborough Still Matters

 

One of the most troubling things about the reactions to the Cohen boycott is the misunderstanding of what the Hillsborough disaster actually meant. There are two fundamentally incorrect reactions to the topic. Let me take two examples from Ollie's most recent comment thread.

 

Quotes:

why can't people just drop this and grow up

 

Some people cannot accept the reality that a bunch of Liverpool fans, some portion of them drunk, crushed other Liverpool fans.

 

Both "It was a long time ago" and "******** Liverpool" are understandable reactions. If we were talking about European Cups of the 1980's, they would be almost unanswerable.

 

But Hillsborough wasn't about Liverpool. It was about soccer fans.

 

Hell, it wasn't really about soccer. It was about what happens when owners and promoters look down on their audiences. Just like, to pick one example, what happened to Who fans in 1979. By the 1980's, football fans in England were seen as the dregs of society.

 

You look at the Premier League today, and it's unthinkable that games used to be played in substandard facilities to audiences considered a couple of steps below pond scum. But this isn't a coincidence. The reaction to the Taylor Report in the 1990's wasn't about hooliganism or Liverpool. It was about stadiums. Remember, in 1989, Hillsborough was still one of the best facilities in England. That's why it was picked for an FA Cup semifinal in the first place. The fact that such a decrepit stadium was deemed suitable for such a match shows how moribund and slothful the game had become.

 

Nowadays, of course, the English game is rich and happy, and a powerful favorite to host a World Cup. If you look at 1989 through a 2009 prism, of course Hillsborough doesn't make sense. But between 1966 and 1989, there were greater profits to be made through inertia than through improvements. The longer things went unchanged, the greater the risk. A disaster was inevitable, it was just a matter of who and where.

 

For the technical aspects of what went wrong, you can read "Hillsborough for Dummies."

 

Which is why blaming Liverpool fans is doubly asinine.

 

Technically, this is Arguing From Authority, but Nick Hornby at least was in England at the time.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by My copy of "Fever Pitch," page 218

It could have happened anywhere. It could have happened at Highbury - on the concrete steps leading out of the North Bank down to the street, maybe (and it doesn't require a very elaborate fantasy to imagine that_; or it could have happened at Loftus Road, where thousands of fans can only gain access to the away end through a coffee bar. And there would have been an enquiry, and newspaper reports, and blame attached to the police, or stewards, or drunken fans, or somebody. But that wouldn't have been right, not when the whole thing was based on such a ludicrous premise.

 

The premise was this: that football stadia built in most cases around a hundred years ago (Norwich City's ground, fifty-eight years old, is the youngest in the First Division) could accommodate between fifteen and sixty-three thousand people without those people coming to any harm. ...By the time football became a forum for gang warfare, and containment rather than safety became a priority (those perimeter fences again), a major tragedy became an inevitability.

 

...

 

There was so much that could and should have been done, and nothing ever was, and everyone trundled along for year after year, for a hundred years, until Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death following some kind of failure in crowd control; it was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck. So you can blame the police for opening the wrong gate at the wrong time if you life, but in my opinion to do so would be to miss the point.

 

Hornby quotes The Economist's contemporaneous article a few pages later, further damning the powers that were.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by "Fever Pitch," p. 224

The Economist on the inevitability of the disaster: "Hillsborough was not just a calamitous accident. It was a brutal demonstration of systematic failure." On the state of the grounds: "Britain's football grounds now resemble maximum-security prisons, but only the feebleness of the regulations has allowed the clubs to go on pretending that crowd safety is compatible with prison architecture." On the football authorities: "For complacency and incompetence, there's nothing like a cartel; and of Britain's surviving cartels, the Football League is one of the smuggest and slackest."

For an Arsenal fan, Hornby is soft on Liverpool fans throughout "Fever Pitch," to be fair. But it's hard to fault his logic, or his facts. Earlier in the book, he himself was an unwilling pitch invader at Highbury, because of precisely the sort of incident that happened in 1989. The disastrous difference was perimeter fencing in Hillsborough.

 

Again, that reads like an archaeology textbook now, because the Football League has been elbowed aside in favor of the Premier League. Do you think all those changes would have come about if the only problem that caused Hillsborough were Liverpool drunks? This is history now, but not ancient history. There's no excuse for not knowing this stuff.

 

Which brings us to the Taylor Report. Speaking for myself, I've had a neckful of people impeaching the Taylor Report without answering any of the specifics of the report. Comparisons to the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission are depressingly hilarious. While you could at least make a bad case that the US government benefited from a coverup in those instances, it's laughable that the Thatcher administration was somehow whitewashing the facts to protect Liverpool fans, of all people, at the expense of the police and the Murdoch press, of all people. It would literally be like saying the 9/11 Commission was trying to cover for Al Qaeda.

 

Yes, there are people who blame George Bush and Dick Cheney for 9/11 - as in, masterminding the whole operation. How does rational society treat those people, again? That's how Taylor Report conspiracists are treated in the UK. When we give them the time of day here, we only make ourselves look ignorant.

 

In any case, a quick review of the final report, and a quick glance at the differences in English football from that day to this, should be more than enough to prove that the issues of Hillsborough ran much, much deeper than drunk Liverpool fans showing up late.

 

As far as it being a long time ago - I think part of that comes from an assumption that the victim's families were compensated anywhere remotely what we in the United States would consider normal. That's far from the case.

 

Well, except for one of the policemen.

 

Quote:

Former sergeant Martin Long, who was at Sheffield Wednesday's ground when 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death in 1989, is thought to have been awarded £330,000 for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the past few years, another 11 former police officers have received a total of £1.2 million.

 

By contrast, the families of the Hillsborough victims have been awarded payments of a few thousand pounds each.

 

Phil Hammond - vice-chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group - whose 14-year-old son was killed in the disaster received £3,500. He condemned the Long payment as "disgusting."

 

I don't think it's generally understood that this is the reason the HJC keeps harping on about Hillsborough. They're not doing it because they're attention whores. We're not talking about Cindy Sheehan or Nancy Grace here. They have by any reasonable light a legitimate reason to keep their cause going. They are fighting against official police conduct and coverup, which means this is way beyond a Liverpool FC fan spat and into the area of UK civil rights and liberties. Seen in this light, condeming Liverpool fans for memorializing the tragedy is more than a little misguided. (Thank you, Conor, for giving me the BBC link.)

 

(Yeah, I asked Conor from LFCNY for factual information about the Hillsborough aftermath. I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Cohen, was I?)

 

Hillsborough was the dark side of the game that forced change, the opposite side of the coin from the 1990 World Cup and England's inspiring performance. Either one or the other would have had significant consequences for the sport - together, it was a case of the sport re-discovering the massive support it had, the potential it had in the modern game, and the consequences of continuing to take that support for granted. It's a completely different situation now in England - probably the only nation that has seen such change in the game from 1989 to 2009 is, well, the United States.

 

Now, of course, you and I as soccer fans are on the right side of the class divide. Not because we've gone up in the world or because our intrinsic worth has been recognized, but because the good god Sponsorship is beaming his countenance upon the sport, and for the moment having its customers beaten and/or killed is bad for business. It's improbable that things will deteroriate to the point where we're in danger of another stadium crush disaster...mainly because people had to die to make sure we'd be in less danger...but yes, it's not something that we need to get up in the morning and go to bed at night worrying about. That's no excuse to forget what came before, and that's certainly no excuse to forget where we really stand in the grand scheme of things.

 

"Oh, it's the World Cup, they'll make sure nothing goes wrong." Yeah. You're probably right.

 

Okay, read this. It's got nothing to do with Liverpool or Hillsborough or anything, but as far as blaming victims, it's useful. Here's the conclusion, if for some reason you won't even click on a damned link when you're asked to:

 

Quote:

We need it to be that simple, that understandable and that fair. Job should not have sinned the way he surely must have sinned. She shouldn't have been out alone, dressed like that, at that time of night. He shouldn't have gotten on the wrong side of the tribal warlord who conned the Americans into detaining him. He shouldn't have reached for his wallet. She shouldn't have fought City Hall. He should have exercised more. She should have eaten healthier. He shouldn't have been so naive. She should have realized that guy was no good. He shouldn't have demanded his rights in such a loud voice.

 

...

 

Every inexplicable injustice can thus be traced back to some act on the part of the victim. And thus a world filled with and characterized by inexplicable injustices can be explained and made to seem wholly just. And we can tell ourselves we're safe.

 

Perfectly safe. As long as we don't think about it too much. And only until the same sort of thing happens to us, at which point our friends will come, like Job's friends, and insist that we must have done something to cause this to happen.

 

Oldest story in the book.

 

So this is why it still matters, this is why it's still being talked about, and this is why it's important to get it right.

 

Okay, what else is there to cover - on a macro basis. I'm saving up a post about Cohen and the actual boycott.

 

"Yeah, okay, what about Munich chants?"

 

Yeah, those were pretty bad. That's another case where It Could Have Been Anyone. But bad weather is impersonal. I can feel the frowns from Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Payne Stewart and Paul Wellstone, but small aircraft crash fall under the heading of bad luck, not criminal negligence. The Busby Babes were not sacrificed on the altar of convenience. They too happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but there was no one to blame...let alone authorities lying about it after the fact trying to blame the victims.

 

Probably because of 1958 - and this is just my distant opinion - Manchester United fans by and large haven't responded in kind regarding 1989 with the equivalent volume, especially considering the thirty-year head start Liverpool had. Perhaps also because (a) Liverpool fans weren't exactly the only people in the country making Munich chants - Leeds fans made Liverpool fans look like angels in comparison - but also because (b) Manchester United fans know perfectly well it could have been them. United had gone twenty years without winning anything at the time - had they made an FA Cup semifinal, the crush would have been at least as tragic. The same was true of any club of any size in England. There but for the grace of God, and the sloth of the FA.

 

I mean - yeah, great, Liverpool sucks, ******** Liverpool, and so forth. No one's saying you have to cheer for them. But just because Liverpool fans cross a big, bright, obvious line doesn't mean it's cool to cross an even more obvious line.

 

"The Ivory Coast disaster was caused by fan stampedes, so isn't it reasonable to assume that Hillsborough was a similar situation?"

 

You mean, apart from the Taylor Report saying it wasn't?

 

Let's look at a few famous examples from music history. Ticketless fans weren't even suggested as an issue for the Who tragedy in Cincinnati in 1979. Ticketless fans showed up in droves for Woodstock...and that ended up fine. Altamont ended up in tragedy, but security was run by the Hells Angels, which was...

 

Say, you think maybe the common thread here is misconduct or negligence by authority? Let's look at the Ivory Coast tragedy.

 

Quote:

Ticketless football fans were behind Sunday's stampede that left 19 people dead in Ivory Coast, officials say.

 

The government is to hold an emergency meeting over the tragedy which left 132 people injured at the Houphouet-Boigny stadium in the biggest city, Abidjan.

 

Oh, well, I stand corrected, seems pretty open-and-shut to

 

Quote:

However, some supporters have said security forces sparked the stampede when they fired tear gas at crowds.

 

Hm...the alleged definitive example of fan misconduct turns out to be the definitive example of official misconduct. The only issue is why this would surprise anyone - the same thing happened in Ghana in 2001.

 

"But what about Heysel? Was it a coincidence that Liverpool scum were at both places?"

 

Well, yeah. According to Hornby, anyway, and again, it seems to ring true to my ears.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by "Fever Pitch" again, pages 156-7

In a sense, their crime was simply being English: it was just that the practices of their culture, taken out of its context and transferred to somewhere that simply didn't understand them, killed people. "Murderers! Murderers!" the Arsenal fans chanted at the Liverpool fans the December after Heysel, but I suspect that if exactly the same circumstances were to be recreated with any group of Engligh fans - and these circumstances would include a hopelessly inadequate police force..., a ludicrously decrepit stadium, a vicious set of opposing fans, and pitifully poor planning on the part of the relevant football authorities - then the same thing would surely happen....

In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards. You couldn't look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, as you had been able to do with the Millwall fans at Luton, or the Chelsea fans in their League Cup match, "who are those people?"; you already knew.

 

It was Liverpool both times, because Liverpool was the best team in England at the time, so they were the team in a position to be at ground zero both times. Could have been Spurs, could have been United, could have been Arsenal, could have been Chelsea. Liverpool was dumb enough to be good in the 1980's. That's literally all there is to it.

[aws]

that's a great article

[dirty_sanchez]

It really is. Fantastically done.

[House of Dirk]

Good work all round. I bet that horrible vitriolic poisonous little cunt never saw this coming.

[OmarVizquel]

By the way, Cohen is not exactly "out." He is still on the World Soccer Daily, a radio show that is broadcast by Sirius. It's also available on iTunes.

 

He was ONLY dropped from the Fox Football Fone-in TV show.

 

He made his hateful comments on World Soccer Daily. Yet he's still on that show. Just thought I'd clarify things so people didn't think he was off the air. He's certainly still broadcasting.

[Guest Ulysses Everett McGill]

By the way, Cohen is not exactly "out." He is still on the World Soccer Daily, a radio show that is broadcast by Sirius. It's also available on iTunes.

 

He was ONLY dropped from the Fox Football Fone-in TV show.

 

He made his hateful comments on World Soccer Daily. Yet he's still on that show. Just thought I'd clarify things so people didn't think he was off the air. He's certainly still broadcasting.

 

I think that might be because WSD is his show, and the only way to get him off it would be to get it off air

[23_Carra_Gold]

Apparently they're pulling the plug on his WSD radio show.

 

The fucking cunt got what he deserves

[OmarVizquel]

Whoa, looks like they've announced the show going off the air today after I posted that last reply. Talk about timing.

[Guest Ulysses Everett McGill]

Whoa, looks like they've announced the show going off the air today after I posted that last reply. Talk about timing.

 

[23_Carra_Gold]

He's had this coming for years.

 

If he had of simply apologised sincerely instead of taking the piss out of us then he'd still have a job.

[RedKnight]

You can't go round spewing out the shit he did and not expect any comeback, he's had his.

[23_Carra_Gold]

You can't go round spewing out the shit he did and not expect any comeback, he's had his.

 

Even after spewing the shit and having a comeback he continued to take the piss. All people wanted at the start was a frank and thought out apology.

 

His actions have led to him losing his job.

[Anubis]

Whoever put down the 'cohen cohen ....gone'tag, step forward and take some rep.

[Cardie]

He has managed to martyr himself on the way down by making out the reason it's over is because his family were being terrorised.

[andymc]

his sponsors deserted him, listeners deserted him and the stations from which he was broadcasting also told him to get to fuck, please allow me to say that if anyone fancies emailing Steven to ask him what he will be doing on his holidays feel free!!!

[Guest ShoePiss]

incredibly satisfying

[Dan Vito Corleone]

Good work. Nasty little cunt.

[drewy]

Wide mouthed cunt, fuck him!