It never fails to amaze, that ol’ Mainstream Media Circus. Is it because papers are folding left and right, layoffs are always imminent and changes are coming at people very rapidly, that the “journalist” of today needs to write about meaningless, stupid, personal, hateful crap to sell the product?
Where did actual reporting go? Don’t sport sections break stories anymore or is that now reserved for websites and blogs like this one or hotdoghockey.com and the websites of the individual teams and leagues. There seems to be more news coming off message boards (How you doing, U of M Bisons?) than out of newspapers these days.
Anyway, let’s look at what’s transpired this week. And have a few laughs.
1) Here’s this week’s trade rumour report – rumours that NEVER seem to come to fruition – courtesy of Trade Rumour Central, the Midnight News of the World. Or, rather, the Ottawa Sun.
The Ottawa Sun now claims that the New York Rangers are trying to trade Christopher Higgins, the Anaheim Ducks are trying to trade Todd Marchant, the Leafs are trying to trade Jason Blake and I love this one: Because the Chicago Blackhawks have a limited amount of cap space, they’re looking to trade Jonathan Toews and/or Patrick Kane.
Yeah, right. And I’m playing point guard for the New York freakin’ Knicks.
These aren’t rumours. These are festering piles of manufactured crapola.
2) Mike Kelly gets smarter every day. And maybe he doesn’t even know it. The Winnipeg media has been obsessed by Kelly’s radio outburst after Sunday’s 48-13 loss in Montreal. If you believe the local hacks, Kelly is bad for football in this town and while it’s nice that he’s giving people who already don’t go to the games an apparently valid excuse to continue not going, he has done something that the last coach of this team would never, ever do.
Kelly has decided that when his team loses, he’s going to take responsibility. What a novel idea. The last guy, Doug (It’s not my job) Berry, would throw half-a-dozen players under the bus before he’d even hint that maybe he didn’t do everything humanly possible to have his team ready to play. In fairness, Berry was often criticized for that approach.
Now, when the local fishwraps get a guy who takes ALL the responsibility, it makes them crazy. “He’s rude,” they cry.
Yep, he’s rude. He’s also taken the spotlight away from a horrible effort in Montreal and taken all the heat himself. Football needs more Mike Kellys, not fewer.
3) Speaking of Kelly, the most interesting suggestion made by the media during the past few weeks is that people have decided NOT to go to Blue Bomber games because those people don’t like the coach. Apparently, since the beginning of the 2009 season, Winnipeg football fans, care only about the coach. The colour of the uniforms and the people wearing those uniforms, no longer matter.
Spare me that crap. People don’t want to go to Blue Bomber games because (a) the parking is lousy, (b) the stadium is a broken-down dump, (c) the post-game traffic is a mess (d) the tickets are a tad expensive and (e) the game is on TSN HD. A growing number of real sports fans in Winnipeg get TSN HD and that means they get every Bomber home game in their living rooms with a great picture and replays and they don’t have to worry about bad parking, warm beer and a rotting stadium.
Get a grip boys. If owners actually believed that people suddenly started buying football tickets to watch coaches, those owners would immediately hire Jessica Biel, Kaley Cuoco, Jennifer Garner and Kate Beckinsale… as coaches.
4) Thanks to cable TV and talk radio, the poor old United States media is slowly but surely becoming a dumping ground for the lunatic fringe. The far-right religious nutters who scream at the tea parties, don’t know where their Medicare comes from, support the Constitution- and Bill of Rights-destroying Patriot Act, think all Latino-Americans are illegals and truly believe their African-American president was, somehow, born in Africa, now have a new hero to go with Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.
His name is Darren Rovell, another mainstream media hack who wrote that Meb Keflezighi, the American-citizen who won the New York City Marathon wasn’t really an American.
This mainstream media knucklehead wrote: “Meb Keflezighi is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement.” Huh?
“Nothing against Keflezighi,” Rovell blurted, “but he’s like a ringer you hire to work a couple of hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league.”
How do people like Rovell get work? And where did the mainstream media’s editors go? Technically American? Keflezighi chose to be an American. Guess he didn’t realize that 11 years after he became a citizen the “birthers” would come along and anyone in America who didn’t have a WASPy name and wasn’t born in Kansas or Indiana was to be considered as foreign as that Barack Hussein Obama guy.
As the Huffington Post’s Henry Blodgett wrote: “…this is seriously disturbing. It’s also probably racist. Would Rovell be saying the same thing if Arnold Schwarzenegger had won the marathon?”
If Rovell had been another far-to-the-right-of-Genghis-Khan nutbag blogger, you’d just laugh, but this was CNBC. Allegedly the big time, with the big money, and the big credibility.
Sad, but like a growing sea of insanity, the mainstream media, on both sides of the border, is becoming as nutty as a fruitcake.
