Laura Ingraham is very concerned about women in sports. I mean, you Google “Laura Ingraham women’s sports” and there is just video after video of her going off the rails about the largely non-existent problem of transgender women playing sports with cis women, frequently arguing that including them could lead to the cis women getting hurt.
But she’s not all that concerned about female sports reporters, particularly those she worries do not see the humor in AI videos of themselves getting smacked in the face.
Let’s rewind a bit! Over the weekend, veteran sports reporter Holly Rowe went to speak to University of Texas coach Steve Sarkisian after his team won a game, only to be rather aggressively blown off.
Admittedly, I have no idea who this man is, but he seems like a real jackass. However, because we now live in a bizarre dystopia in which men who act like jackasses to women are celebrated as heroes, the move was largely celebrated over on X the Everything App.
“Yes, they sent an annoying hog to harass him when he wants to go celebrate his greatest win ever with the MEN,” wrote one especially classy user. “The last thing a man on a team wants to do right then is to talk to some annoying woman that has never once stepped into a similar situation.”
So rude of her to … try to do her job?
At some point after that, a reporter from Inside Texas asked University of Texas player Arch Manning, of the Manning football dynasty, about any social media he’d seen about the game.
“I’ve seen a few AI edits of stuff, but that’s about it. I saw an AI edit of Sark’s interview. Have you all seen that one? That’s a good one. Of him slapping Holly Rowe?” Manning said, laughing, like a normal human man laughs at fake videos of women getting smacked. Evan Vieth, the reporter in question, described his answer as “gold.”
Here’s the video he found so incredibly hilarious.
Surprisingly enough, Manning’s comments did not go over so well with everyone, and he must have received some kind of criticism from someone, because, on Wednesday, he issued an apology in an Instagram story.
In my press conference yesterday, I made an insensitive comment about an Al video.
There is nothing funny about it. It’s easy to say I didn’t mean it, but I know my words and actions were hurtful to a lot of people. I do not take that lightly and am deeply sorry for that.
I specifically want to apologize to Holly Rowe for what she has personally had to deal with because of my comments. I have a ton of respect for her and appreciate her showing me grace in this moment. I need to do better and will be more thoughtful going.
To be clear, Rowe did not say a single thing publicly about the incident, until he apologized, at which point she very classily accepted his apology and moved on.
“Thank you, Arch. I appreciate our conversation about this — which will remain private. Apology accepted. We move forward with respect and kindness for one another,” she wrote.
And if we lived in a normal world, that would be that. Sadly, we do not. There were a whole lot of people absolutely outraged that Manning was “forced” to apologize just for finding a video of a woman being smacked “hilarious.” One of those people, as you may have guessed by now, was Laura Ingraham. Ingraham took a break on Wednesday from her usual histrionics about how the WNBA needs to specifically put that women are “adult human females” with XX chromosomes in their guidelines in order to “protect” the safety of cis women and crying about how violent the Left is and how mean they are to conservative reporters and pundits to take aim at Rowe for, um, accepting the apology? I guess?
“Embarrassing,” she wrote on X. “For an veteran sideline reporter to extract an apology from a young player for an innocent offhand comment about an AI video is absurd.”
It’s not clear how she “extracted” this apology, given the fact that she said absolutely nothing about it publicly. Possibly just by existing? And being a woman?
It’s also not clear what Laura would have liked her to do instead? Share the video herself and announce that AI videos of women getting smacked are, in fact, very hilarious and we should all laugh at them? Refused to accept his apology? Resign from ESPN in shame?
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It seems relatively unlikely that Ingraham would have defended Manning’s ability to find humor in AI violence against women if that AI violence had been directed at a conservative woman or even a man. After all, she went after Jon Ossoff for making a joke about Trump’s love-letter-writing aide Natalie Harp, accusing him of wearing too much bronzer and “rouge.” Because of how she hates it when male politicians wear an excessive amount of makeup.
Save for, of course, the obvious exception to that rule.
But conservatives have recently been particularly miffed at Rowe, largely because she put “anti-racist” in her social media platform bios, which is not allowed, and was mean to some guy who was saying mean shit about WNBA player Angel Reese. Also not allowed! He was so hurt by that that he had to write a whole essay for Fox News about it, and didn’t even manage to “extract” an apology from her. Clearly, 63-year-old Laura Ingraham saw an opportunity to be a “cool girl” here and go after another woman that some men in her political cohort were mad at, and she took it.
Surely, this means that they will respect her dedication to hating the same women they hate and to normalizing violence against women as a comedic device, and never, ever turn on her.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Sideline reporter is not an easy gig. You have to try to interview coaches and players who either 1) don't want to talk to you or 2) speak in nothing but cliches and platitudes. And then there's the dodging of Gatorade, water, and whipped cream when a player makes the winning play at the end of the game...
Holly Rowe is good at her job - she's been ESPN's main sideline reporter for high-profile college football games for nearly 30 years. Steve Sarkisian knows who she is, and he was just being a jackass by walking away from her.
The thing that conservatives are trying to conserve are the hierarchies of the past, including the gender hierarchy that did minimize violence against women by making it comedic or treating it as a family matter.
So yeah, hierarchy. To them, a young man from a famous family playing a sport that is popular shouldn't have to apologize to an "uppity" woman for enjoying an AI video of her getting smacked around by a football coach.