Media minds: Read the following 755 words -- then quit it!
Today, Journalism 100 takes us through three more reasons why some of us (but not me) could use a good beating.
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| When the questions about his coach started coming, Ray Lewis was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. (Getty Images) |
It is, however, easy to figure this part out: They were asked the question by people wanting them to do just that, and they were therefore presented with the age-old conundrum -- be politically correct and sound weak and spineless, or attack the coach as requested and then get ripped for being a mutinous hyena.
And that, boys and girls, is why they hate us. We give them two false choices, and they can either be ripped for choosing, or not choosing.
The play-calling question is almost always designed to hose an athlete. Maybe not consciously, because many interviewers are barely conscious, but the practical result has been seen too many times for this not to be coincidental. It's "Tell us why you think your coach sucks," and you can either come off half-cocked and a troublemaker by agreeing, or you can disagree with the premise and get the classic follow-up, "What do you mean he's doing a good job? Are you paying attention? Are you stupid? What's up with you?"
So now Lewis, whose career was essentially saved by Billick after the Atlanta Super Bowl stabbing, is neatly boxed in again. And Gore gets caught up in a public firestorm about Hostler's alleged inadequacies in trying to make a bad offense with average players good despite it all. It makes your head hurt.
On the other hand, it is also World Series time, and that means two other things that make people wish the media were kept in small roaming pens outside town. The first is savaging a manager or coach after having seen a bad result to a choice they have made, on the theories that (a) they should have seen into the future and known what was coming, and (b) that talking to the manager or coach before killing them in public is for wussies.
This is typically reserved for pitching changes, though not always, as Cleveland third-base coach Joel Skinner found out when he held Kenny Lofton in the early stages of Game 7 of the ALCS, a game the Indians lost 11-2. The notion that one event doesn't always create the desired effect for subsequent events never occurs to the second-guessers, but then again, many of the people covering the World Series have been doing this awhile and still think it is the best way to cover the game -- wait for an important moment, and find out why the manager of the team that is victimized should have known better.
And finally, with this World Series specifically in mind, be particularly aware of the pundit who makes a fetish of the Rockies being unknown. This is typically blamed on East Coast bias, when it is no such thing. It is actually just laziness raised to a virtue, and the geography doesn't really play into it.
Yes, the Rockies came on late, which is part of their charm and all, but it's been a month now, and non-clever jokes about the Rockies being no-names are simply a confession that the joke-teller prefers being thought of as an idiot. If you don't know about something, the time-honored choice is to drag your ass to a resource, like say the Internet, and learn who to contact to get more informed insights on the subjects, or get them one's self. It can be done, and while it takes more time than making a bad pun about Ubaldo Jimenez's first name or Troy Tulowitzki's last name (although Ubaldo Tulowitzki would be pretty damned funny), at least you wouldn't be coming off as a moron.
Unless, of course, that was the plan all along -- to be noticed for any reason at all.
And therein lies the crux of this evening's lesson -- find three reasons why the losing manager screwed up Game 1, and then stop, examine the problem again, and then drop a full three-liter bottle of gin on your foot and wait for the pain to subside. You'll stop worrying about the manager, that's for damned sure.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
