Aaron Rodgers says enough headline-worthy things on his own. We don’t need to start pinning other people’s quotes on him.
The Green Bay Packers‘ quarterback continued his recent media tour by adding Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast to a list of stops that already includes the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience and Barstool’s Pardon My Take. During his podcast appearances, Rodgers mocked President Joe Biden, railed against vaccine mandates, explained why he chose to lie about his COVID-19 immunization status, detailed his use of the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, and mocked the media’s coverage of him.
Rodgers has not held back in offering headline worthy comments and that continued during his nearly two-hour-long conversation with Maher, which was released this past Sunday, where the quarterback spoke about Biden, abortion, COVID and claimed California is “going to sh*t.”
Of course, it was a quote about Donald Trump that gained arguably the most traction from Rodgers’ appearance on the Club Random podcast. There, the former president was ripped for not accepting the 2020 election results. But that quote, which many aggregators attributed to Rodgers, was actually said by Maher.
“You take it like a man,” Maher said. “You don’t go, ‘We won that game’ That’s what Donald Trump does. ‘We won that game.’ You didn’t. You lose it. It happens. You lose sometimes. Be a f**king man and just own up like every other president has ever done.”
At the one-hour, 40-minute mark of the above podcast, you can hear that it was Maher who chastised Trump for not accepting that he lost the 2020 Presidential Election to Joe Biden. However, in the last week, the quote was aggregated and attributed to Aaron Rodgers by The Spun, NFLMemes, The Daily Snark, Total Pro Sports, The SportsRush, Sportskeeda and Essentially Sports. The articles or tweets were published between Sept. 10 -12. As of Sept. 16 at 5pm EST, none of them have corrected the significant blunder.
Each aggregator will likely point the finger at someone else for getting it wrong first. And it’s entirely possible that another unnamed site was the one who initially misquoted Rodgers before correcting the error to avoid criticism. Every outlet, however, could have very easily avoided the gaffe by simply listening to the podcast, which may sound daunting. And in that case, just don’t write the article.
Since he purposefully duped reporters about his vaccination status prior to the 2021 NFL season, Rodgers has railed against the media for mistreating him, claiming a line in the sand was drawn with the people he trusts and those he doesn’t. Although a lot of his criticism directed toward the media has felt unjust, considering he’s the one who lied to reporters last year, taking Maher’s quote about Trump and attributing it to Rodgers is brutally unfair to the quarterback. It’s a significant error, and the amount of websites or social media accounts that jumped on without checking where the quote came from only fuels recent complaints about the aggregate media.
