“You set a precedent that you’re Mark Cuban’s errand boy.”
In a bizarre set of events even for the unhinged world of social media, Mark Cuban made news Monday for publicly attacking Bleacher Report after the sports website specializing in NBA basketball coverage tweeted a completely innocuous video from its official handle of Dirk Nowitzki air-balling a three pointer with the caption ‘Dirk Forever!’
Soon to follow was an antagonistic and extremely uncomfortable exchange between the Mavericks owner and Turner President David Levy, on the appropriateness of the tweet, with Cuban posting screenshots on his official Twitter account of the actual emails both of them were exchanging practically in real time , with the messages containing expletives and outlandish threats towards Levy if the Tweet wasn’t removed from b/r's account ASAP.
The Tweet would soon be deleted by Bleacher Report, owned by Turner, leading Clay Travis to question why Levy would so easily cave to Cuban, when clearly B/R did absolutely nothing wrong.
“Nobody would have even known that Mark Cuban’s beloved Dirk Nowitzki had missed this three-pointer and air-balled it badly unless Mark Cuban had lost his mind complaining about it,” Travis explained. “When you pull down a Tweet, you actually create more news surrounding pulling down the Tweet than what ever existed if you just left it up.”
Travis thinks Cuban getting his way after such an extreme display of petulance, creates a dangerous precedent for future NBA coverage on b/r’s part, considering they gave in to an unhibited owner's ridiculous demands when their content resembled microscopic traces of malice, if even that.
“I don’t know how you can ever trust The Bleacher Report again,” Travis said. “Now, every single time that you have any content that anybody in the NBA in a position of power deems to be objectionable, the first thing they think is ‘Bleacher Report should pull this down because they’ve already set the precedent of pulling it down before.’”