Do we like them?

Do we like Paul Allen?

Our score: 6 out of 10. One clumsy 'paid protesters' joke he apologised for, no other harm found, but the record of good deeds is thin.

Paul Allen is the voice of Minnesota Vikings radio and a long-time KFAN sports talk host. Reporting on his career says he took over Vikings play-by-play in the early 2000s after an earlier audition didn't land. He also calls horse races at Canterbury Park each summer.

The thing he's being asked about is a joke that went sideways. On his show on 23 January 2026, while talking about the bitter cold, he asked whether the people protesting ICE in Minneapolis got hazard pay. The 'paid protesters' line is one critics have long pushed against demonstrators, and the clip got shared widely after Awful Announcing highlighted it.

The reaction was fast. Reports say his post of the clip drew thousands of replies, many demanding he be dropped, and on 26 January he opened his show with an apology. He said the comments were “insensitive and poorly timed” and stepped away for a few days, with a fill-in hosting.

On harm, this is the only mark we found. He didn't double down: he said sorry, took time off, and came back on 2 February repeating the apology. Neither KFAN nor the Vikings said publicly whether he was disciplined, and Canterbury Park said he'd stay on as track announcer. An apology isn't a free pass, so the test is whether he does it again; nothing since has turned up.

We went looking for anything on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or climate in his own words and found nothing. We also found no court cases or misconduct allegations against him. That's a clean record by what we could verify, but it's a thin one.

The good stuff is mostly the craft. His Vikings calls are a Minnesota institution, and NFL Films has been reported to be working on a feature about him. We couldn't find charity work or kindness stories to point to, so we can't give him full marks.