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News Stuck provides continually updated commentary regarding the pollution of the public airwaves by Media conglomerates and news organizations that ignore the needs of our democracy.

An Uneducated Man With 100 Million Dollars Likes To Watch Dogs Fight

Once again the “news” has become stuck on a sports celebrity non-story and quickly heaped piles of faux-shock onto our airwaves. The media’s dogfight and pony show where they elevate Atlanta Falcon NFL Quarterback Michael Vick to the status of folk-hero based solely on his ability to run fast and throw a piece of inflated pigskin farther than most men only to later gasp with disingenuous abhorrence at his off field animal-cruelty shows them to be what they really are. High-pitched Chicken Littles who seek to sell advertising with the headline “Sky Is Falling” by acting surprised by easily predictable tragedies instead of stewarding the media’s role in serving the public interest as they have been charged with under the terms of their FCC license.

Michael Dwayne Vick was born on June 26, 1980, in Newport News, Virginia. Like most port cities, Newport News fell on hard times in the 1970s and 80s. The area was an underprivileged southern town known for producing drug dealers and gang members during the period of Michael’s youth. Michael’s family situation was also far from perfect. His mother, Brenda Vick, was 16 when she became pregnant with him. His father, Michael Boddie, was 17 and they were already the parents of his older sister Christina. Michaels parents remained unmarried until he was five years old, when they took their vows and later went on to produce two more children, Marcus and Courtney.

After spending a couple years in the Army, Michael’s father bounced from one job to another until he finally found some steady work as a sandblaster and spray-painter working in the local shipyards. Because of the long hours his father worked, raising Michael was primarily the responsibility of his mother Brenda which is why Michael and his siblings all chose to use her last name Vick instead of their father’s last name. The family lived in a three bedroom apartment of the Ridley Circle housing project while Brenda tried to make ends meet by working at a local KMart.

Michael was three or four years old when his father nicknamed him “Bullet” because of his abnormally fast running speed. Michael became a constant inhabitant of the Hampton Roads Boys and Girls Club along with his cousin Aaron Brooks (who went on to become a starting Quarterback for the New Orleans Saints). It was there that Michael’s physical gifts first started to be realized and admired. By the time he reached elementary school, Michael showed tremendous promise in basketball, baseball, track and football.

Michael went to Ferguson High School in 1994. The school was later shut down due to budget cuts in 1996, and Michael was transferred to Warwick High School. High School Coach Reamon assigned Michael to the junior varsity as a freshman. In his first 6 games at quarterback, Michael threw 20 touchdown passes. Coach Reamon elevated Michael to varsity and in his 2nd game as Quarterback he threw for 433 yards. From there he went on to be highly recruited around the country by college coaches until he signed with football powerhouse Virginia Tech.

SuperPrep and PrepStar, two “newspapers” that actually earn a living ranking 15-18 year old athletes, each named Michael a pre-season All-America. Vick became a superstar on a national level while playing quarterback in college. He played in many nationally televised games, won several awards and in the ramp-up to the NFL draft he ran the 40 yard dash in a widely reported 4.25 seconds.

Michael Vick was drafted first overall by the Atlanta Falcons after a trade made with the San Diego Chargers. At 20 years of age, Michael was signed to a six-year contract worth a potential $62 million dollars, including a signing bonus of $15 million up front. To put that in perspective, the contract was worth more than 3 million dollars for every year that Michael had been alive. Keep in mind, at age 20 he was being paid 6.2% of a billion dollars solely because he was able to run the 40 yard dash in 4.2 seconds, throw a pigskin very far and learn a playbook of offensive formations and strategies.

Even in Junior High school Michael was the subject of reportedly numerous disciplinary problem with teachers. His brother Marcus fell off most team draft boards because of behavioral issues both on and off the field. At no point did anyone take any real interest in his mental or emotional development above and beyond his physical development. Why would they? Virginia Tech and the NCAA have made countless millions of dollars from publicity garnered by Michael’s on-field heroics. His #7 Atlanta Falcons jersey was among the top sellers league wide. He became the public face of the billion dollar Atlanta Falcons football franchise. A slew of companies lined up to hire him for advertising campaigns for everything from sports drinks to sneakers.

Is it bad that men likes to train animals to brutally and savagely attack each other during inhumane contests for the sake of “sport” and gambling proceeds. Surely it is. Las Vegas odd-smakers and bookies around the country make over a billion dollars a year betting on the NFL. Players routinely use steroids and other performance enhancing drugs at great risk to their own health - along with a plethora of clandestine practices to avoid their detection during less than state-of-the-art league sponsored drug testing. It is common to say that NFL teams need at least two good quarterbacks on their roster because if the starter becomes injured (which happens with near inevitability to almost every team in the league each year) the backup needs to be able to step into the game and win. Oh, by brutally savage and inhumane sport you thought I meant dogfighting?

The simple fact is we breed professional football players, spur them to be bigger, faster and stronger, ignore their mental or emotional frailties, gamble on their acts of physical aggression and call it a national past time. Isn’t it just a tad hypocritical of us to be so outraged when they do the same thing with dogs that our sports-loving public does with humans?

Before you start saying “yeah but we don’t kill them and make them fight to the death or force them to participate against their will”; have a good hard look at some of the data compiled which shows lower life expectancies among retired NFL players, concussion syndrome and the rest of the obvious connections between a life playing professional football and an unnaturally curtailed lifespan. Then ask yourself, did a 20 year old boy from a poor town really have a choice to turn down football when we offered him 6.2% of a billion dollars to play it after we had failed to provide him the educational tools he should have gotten as part of a college education?

I’m not saying it is ok to torture dogs and call it sport. I’m saying when our nation does it every year with humans, the media would be well advised not to act so surprised that one of them decided to do it with dogs.

Barry Bonds Does Steroids and Hits a Ball Over A Fence With A Stick!!!

Barry Bonds, like his father Bobby Bonds, is a Baseball Player. In the grand scheme of things the greatest goal he could ever have aspired to would be to accomplish the kinds of things Jackie Robinson did by using sports as a grand metaphor for life and bridging the gap on issues of race or class. He could also have tried to emulate Curt Flood who broke few records but is almost single-handedly responsible for what is now known as player free-agency. Flood's contribution to the world was responsible for one of the largest transfers of wealth from the idle rich to the working poor in modern history.

Bonds did none of that. Instead he set his sights on what he felt was a more lofty goal, hitting a small ball over a fence with a stick as many times as he could. He became so addicted to and focused on the task of hitting a ball over a fence with a stick that he decided to have quasi-doctors inject his body full of harmful chemicals designed to enhance his ability to hit a ball over a fence with a stick.

All of that has lead us to this moment in history when a man who has surely reduced his life expectancy by decades is now at a point where he has hit a ball over a fence with a stick as often as any other major league baseball player ever has /yawn. If he breaks the record, race relations will not improve, class warfare will not be quashed. The United States will still be mired in a war for no reason against inhabitants that never asked for our help nor wanted it. And, like the wealthy Mr. Bonds, the rest of the top 1% of earners will continue to widen the gap as a new gilded age is ushered in on the backs of working class people who slave away at two or three jobs just to subsist or to maintain necessary health benefits for their families.

When Barry breaks the big record, perhaps there will be a moment of hope. Surely some fan in the crowd will claw and scratch his way to the record breaking ball that Barry hit over a fence with a stick. He will do that because the ball will be worth over a half-million dollars to sports memorabilia collectors.

Like a dog desperately seeking scraps from the table of its master he will fight off all other would-be ball collectors and, as has been the case in the past, he will even go to court if necessary to secure his rights in a $3 round piece of leather and twine. The fan will do all of that because Barry hit one over the fence with a stick for the 756th time and because it is that fan's single greatest chance of accumulating economic stability and a sense of financial security for his own golden years when neither universal health care nor social security nor his memories of famous home-runs will protect him from poverty as much as that home-run collectible will.

Does ABC World News Tonight, MSNBC, FOXnews and every other supposed real news entity in print, or electronic media really need to give day by day account of what a steroid laden 40+ year old man can do with a wood stick and a ball as compared to the height of a fence? Perhaps they might focus at least a fraction of their attention on the question of why so many fans who claim daily on sports radio to despise what Barry Bond's cheating has done to the game they love will be the same dirty creatures crawling around the beer-soaked stands viciously trying to get their grubby hands on Barry's ball like impoverished Charlies wishing to find a golden ticket in their one and only WonkaBar.

Paris Cried On Her Way To Jail ?

The news media's fascination with do-nothing-trust-fund-girl Paris Hilton has been out of control for quite some time. The major networks cover her appearance at a dance club or a concert with as much gusto as they ought to be devoting to the illegal wire tapping of American citizens, resurgence of Taliban in Afghanistan, toning down of standards at American military training bases or some new medical breakthrough. Saying to the news media that Paris Hilton is not newsworthy is a platitude, however now this twisted obsession has began to encroach upon the intellectual blogosphere as well.

Video and pictures and commentary have sprouted up throughout the blogosphere to examine the fact that Paris Hilton was caught on videotape crying in a car while being transported to jail. How can that possibly be news to anyone but Paris Hilton's immediate group of friends and family?

Is it news that someone cried before being incarcerated? Is it news that someone who lived a life of privilege broke the law and was punished for it? To give you an idea how far from being news this is; I asked fifteen people who are reasonably sentient citizens of our society about this story. All fifteen knew Paris Hilton was going to jail and that she cried on camera. All of them had seen the video. Not one of them could describe the charges filed against her, the circumstances of her trial or any abnormality in jurisprudence relating to her case.

All they could recall was this:

Some of you may know Paris Hilton was recently arrested... how many of you know what she was arrested for? The news went wild with stories about her. Not so much about the the crime or the facts of the case, just about the fact that Paris Hilton was arrested and might have to spend a few weeks in minimum security prison.

Even before she was convicted, with apparently no interest in whether or not she should be convicted, the news began showing the cell she might reside in juxtaposed with video of her enjoying the nightlife. This was not a matter of legal interest or public interest, it was purely one of prurient interest aimed at getting viewers to daydream about a hot young teen in a jail cell like some late night unrated movie about jailhouse babes being shown on the Cinemax channel.

It makes sense that blogs devoted to celebrity banter, personal blogs by individuals expressing themselves or blogs produced by people who actually know Paris Hilton - might want to spend some time talking about her recent arrest. That should not extend to blogs that want to be considered newsworthy intellectual analysis of the world we live in. Have you flipped through the more noted "intellectual blogs" that claim to be providing news and analysis of the human condition on this planet? It seems now they too have become infected with the disease of unfocused interest as Paris Hilton's meaningless existence spreads one step closer to omnipotence.

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An Uneducated Man With 100 Million Dollars Likes To Watch Dogs Fight

Barry Bonds Does Steroids and Hits a Ball Over A Fence With A Stick!!!

Paris Cried On Her Way To Jail ?

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