America Live Debates: Why Did ESPN Apologize for Brent Musburger Saying AJ McCarron's Girlfriend Is Beautiful?
During Monday night's BCS Championship game in Miami, ESPN's cameras found the beauty queen girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron. Play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger was awestruck by the beauty of Katherine Webb, a 23-year-old former Miss Alabama USA, and he was immediately criticized for going on just a little too long about it during the broadcast.
Musburger said to ex-quarterback/broadcast teammate Kirk Herbstreit that, "You quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman. Wow."
He went on...
"If you're a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with pop."
ESPN apologized the next day for Musburger "going too far." Megyn Kelly debated the issue on America Live today with Fox News contributors Monica Crowley and Kirsten Powers.
Did Musburger actually go too far or is the network simply trying too hard to be politically correct?
The three women were in complete agreement that Musburger did not "go too far," with Kelly asking, "what did he say that was so offensive!?"
Kelly and Crowley agreed that it would have seemed odd to viewers if Musburger had not said something about Webb's looks given that she was a former beauty queen.
"He hardly said anything," Powers noted. "He called her lovely and beautiful. People act like he was drooling and saying inappropriate things. To me, this is just feminism gone awry. ... I think it's notable that Musburger is in his 70s, and I think men of that era still feel comfortable saying things like this whereas everybody else has been cowed into a fear of even acknowledging that a woman is beautiful (because) it's somehow sexist or harassment."
Kelly pointed out that a lot of men think they'll be called a pervert if they say something like that.
"The word police are everywhere," said Crowley. "So regardless of what you say, you call a woman 'beautiful,' you call Tom Brady a 'hunk,' suddenly the word police are on top of you. You can't make a joke, you can't even give a valid compliment to somebody without somebody in some corner of society jumping all over you, and I think that's unfortunate."
Watch the full discussion:
