Al Michaels Winning, Jesse Watters Spinning, Two Questions | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

Iconic play-by-play voice Al Michaels talked with Eminem at Super Bowl LVI on Sunday and the two stars were seen chatting like best friends as they traded compliments with each other.

Michaels told Eminem, who was one of the halftime performers, that he was “the best in show.” And Eminem was straight up giddy as he called the veteran sports broadcaster “the GOAT.”

Eminem brought up the big question: Is Michaels going to retire?

NBC inked a deal in 2018 poaching Mike Tirico from ESPN to eventually replace Michaels on Sunday night. The dissent against Michaels leaving was voiced by Howard Stern fairly emphatically recently. But would leaving NBC mean leaving football?

“I’ll be somewhere,” Michaels insisted.

While it’s been widely assumed that Michaels is not ready to retire, the 77-year-old has been mostly quiet on his future. But the reassurance that he’ll be calling football games somewhere next season puts that at least partly to rest.

Sunday’s match-up between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams was the 11th Super Bowl call of Michaels’ illustrious career. Michaels has been featured on NBC’s Sunday Night Football since 2006, but his contract expired after Super Bowl LVI and the network has Mike Tirico ready to take over the broadcast.

According to data from Nielsen, Super Bowl LVI drew 99.18 million viewers. That’s a big jump from last year, but short of the 100 million mark reached in 10 of the 11 seasons prior. However, when you include Telemundo, and the streaming and digital viewers, it’s well over that mark.

From a Stern defense to Eminem fandom, ratings up and reputation intact, Michaels has been getting good press at the end of a good season. Though his future won’t be with NBC, he’s an elite play-by-play voice and a hot commodity among some of the NFL’s other broadcast partners, and it sounds like one of them may be grabbing him up.

Jesse Watters falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton paid hackers to plant fake evidence in an effort to show Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government.

The Fox News host then used his mischaracterization of the filing to state as fact that Clinton had attempted to frame Trump.

Last week Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion alleging Clinton hired a tech executive, confirmed to be Rodney Joffe, with legal access to non-public, non-private internet data, some of which was allegedly used in an effort to link Trump to Russia… ICYMI.

Durham is investigating the probe into Trump that culminated in the Mueller Report, which found no evidence Trump conspired with Russia, but that Trump nonetheless welcomed the country’s help during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Watters certainly isn’t alone among conservative media figures making sensationalistic and false claims about the filing, but the allegation that fake evidence was planted stands out. He told his audience Durham’s documents “show that Hillary Clinton hired people” who hacked Trump and “planted evidence that he colluded with Russia.”

“Yeah. You heard that right,” Watters emphasized, saying again, “Her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia, then fed that doctored material to the feds and the media.”

The obvious problem is Durham’s documents don’t show this – at all.

Not even close, actually.

This goes past wildly speculative on the part of Jesse Watters. It’s irresponsible for a news channel, it’s deliberately deceptive to the audience for the sake of being provocative, and the reporting on the story from his own network does not support the wild claim. And this wasn’t even the only false thing said on-air last night that’s contradicted by the Fox’s own reporting.

People spend a lot of time talking about media bias, which is a real thing and can go both ways. But this isn’t that. This was bad, wrong, Media Loser “fake news.”