LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – There was a wonderfully funny Mike Judge movie called Idiocracy released in 2007 starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. It was about an average guy who awakes from a 500-year sleep/coma only to find that the United States had been dumbed-down to such an extent that he was now, clearly, the most intelligent person on the planet.
If our North American mainstream media continues to dumb us all down the way it has in recent years, Idiocracy won’t be a far-fetched cult-comedy. Soon, it will be North America.
Let’s take a look at another week in the wonderful world of mainstream media lies, lunacy and lethargy.
1) Isn’t it great when the media runs a guy out of town? Just ask Winnipeg football fans who allowed their own local mainstream media knuckleheads to run Bomber quarterback Kevin Glenn out of town, only to listen to that listen to that same media mob lament Glenn’s departure when he came back to beat the Bombers in the final game of the 2009 season.
In Kansas City, the local media didn’t like Larry Johnson, didn’t like what he (allegedly) said to them and they certainly didn’t want him around. So they joined forces, created a media mob and convinced everyone in the Chiefs organization that Johnson called them all an offensive name and demanded that the Chiefs release him.
The Chiefs did, of course, bowing to the same local media pressure that has helped make the Winnipeg Blue Bombers a team that has had four coaches and hundreds of players (many of them quarterbacks) in just six years.
So what did Johnson do last Sunday? He rushed for 107 yards for the playoff bound Cincinnati Bengals. If the Chiefs never make the playoffs again, it will be too soon. When the media — people who have never played a down of actual real football — runs your team, you’re finished.
2) The mainstream media in Winnipeg has found a new method to help the board of directors of the football club make a decision to fire head coach Mike Kelly. The latest is to suggest that corporate sponsors will cancel their financial commitments to the club if Kelly is back as head coach next season.
As a person who works seven days a week in the corporate sponsorship field, I can assure the board and the local mainstream media story tellers that no corporate sponsor is leaving the football club because Kelly is or isn’t the head coach.
A sponsor might leave because there is a recession and money is tight. He might leave because he doesn’t feel a sponsorship with the club will give him the advertising bang he requires. He might not even want his brand associated with a dumpy stadium and a football club that hasn’t won a title in 19 years. But there is not one sponsor who, honestly, will pull his support because of the coach.
I’ve asked countess corporate sponsors if they plan to pull their financial support from the football club because Kelly is the head coach and not one has said anything of the sort. I’ve also asked more than one board member which sponsors might be leaving and they have no idea.
So let’s bury another mainstream media myth (lie?). There might be reasons why some corporate sponsors would pull their support from the Winnipeg Football Club, but it is NOT because Mike Kelly is or isn’t the head coach.
3) Why would any sports fan spend a dollar on a newspaper? By the time a newspaper gets a story, it’s not just 24 hours old, it’s often multiple-weeks old.
Friday’s official re-signing of Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith by the Chicago Blackhawks was first announced in Winnipeg on 92-CITI-FM 18 days ago — on the same day the pending deals were announced by a couple of Chicago-area sports blogs. The Chicago Tribune had the rumours the next morning.
The pending contract signings were discovered as a response to a Sun Media “report,” out of Ottawa that claimed Toews, Kane and Keith were all on the trade block in Chicago because the Hawks had “salary cap issues.” As usual, that newspaper report turned out to be false.
Thursday at 92-CITI, we had the story on the contracts’ details and Saturday, the stories finally reached the local newspapers after the Hawks officially announced the deals (Toews and Kane each agreed to five-year. $31.5 million deals while Duncan Keith signed a cap-busting 13-year, $72 million contract).
And people actually pay money for old news? A lot of people are dumber than we thought.