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| 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 healthcare 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 misfocused interest as Paris Hilton's meaningless existence spreads one step closer to omnipotence. Rosie Vs. Elizabeth. That's How We Analyze War? The latest spat between co-hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O'Donnell on the daytime television show The View has gotten a tremendous amount of media coverage. It has been the subject of entire segments on media outlets as far reaching in their political leanings as Fox & Friends and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. It has also found its way into traditionally non-political venues like People magazine. Can it really be true that these two loudmouth idiots with no grasp on factual reality are having the most meaningful public debate in the minds of many Americans regarding the Iraq War? Take a look at this video from their show this week: Since the conflict began there have been arguments for and against American policy passing each other aimlessly on the airwaves like ocean liners in the dead of night. Fox News takes the "for the war" position and beats the drum as loud as it can to resonate with those who agree with their point of view and MSNBC does the exact same thing from the opposite perspective each day and night on their own network. Strangely, as the two sides never seem to appear in the same place at the same time, no meaningful debate ever gets put before the public. Even in political circles, all Republicans at their party's primary debates are uniformly for the American presence in the region and all Democrats at their own party debates claim to be uniformly against it. Since neither side is ever in the same room with the opposing point of view, nobody has to answer any meaningful questions and nobody is ever held accountable for the flaws in their own beliefs. It seems as if some people have decided that if somebody might not agree with them, rather than risking the possibility that their own views might be challenged and overcome by a more persuasive opposing viewpoint - they actually feel they are better off saving their comments until they are in a room full of people who think the same way they do. Instead of changing their own failed opinion, they prefer to change the people they are speaking with. This kind of systemic idiocy is not only ridiculous on an intellectual level, it leads to absurd outcomes like these two morons from The View seeming to be great minds of the new "Idiocracy" we are now living in! Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck are, in my strong opinion, not qualified to speak with any expertise on the topic of war, politics, the ethics of combat, the difficulties troops face... and most other topics of importance. One is an idiot who finished 3rd on a reality TV show where she stopped eating for weeks until her hair fell out because she wanted to win the grand prize of a few hundred thousand dollars. The other is a comedian whose biggest claims to fame are her constant self-pity over being overweight and her overly proud attitude for being a lesbian (there is nothing wrong with being a lesbian, but anyone who truly favors equal rights understands that being a lesbian does not entitle you to any more praise from others than being heterosexual would). Yes, that's right. Two idiots, who are on television only because real programming that requires writers and scripts is too expensive to produce, actually began discussing the war and forcing each other to at least acknowledge opposing positions about the war. Rosie intelligently brought up the fact that some media outlets have disingenuously claimed she is "against the troops" for questioning the duality of being both an occupying force in Iraq while claiming the inhabitants are terrorists. Elizabeth succinctly pointed out the face that Rosie should not expect others to defend her point of view when they don't agree with it just because they are both paid by the same production company. Now, to be sure, this was not a high level cabinet meeting or significant United Nations debate about the future of the region. This was not even particularly interesting television programming. However, it seems to me that the public is now so starved for some kind of analysis which requires speakers to at least address the views of their opposition that even these two ill prepared twits were able to garner tremendous attention by attempting to do so. This is not a call for the return of yelling matches like CrossFire was before Jon Stewart shut them down. This is a call for politicians, pundits and the populace to look around at the sad state of debate in this country and do something to bring it back as a mainstay of our country's strategic discourse. Without politicians who at least acknowledge and directly respond to each other's point of view, the public can never have an apples to apples comparison by which to decide their vote. If you are waiting for one during a Presidential debate, just keep in mind the fact that the National League of Woman Voters refused to sanction the last presidential debate because the two political parties had choreographed the rules of the show to such an extent that neither candidate was allowed to address the other or to respond directly to each other. Can it really be, that Rosie and Elisabeth are more likely to hash out agreements on The View than presidential nominees are to reach meaningful definitions of agreement and disagreement about a war that is costing American lives daily at a rate even greater than The View is costing brain cells to commit suicide within its audience? The Truth About Automotive Safety Standards The video shown above has not been enhanced or doctored in any way. It appeared live on ABC television over the past weekend and it shows exactly what happened to Kyle Busch's car during Saturday's NASCAR Busch Series race at Talladega Superspeedway. Did you notice anything surprising at the end of the video clip? The typical news story has been: "Busch was in second place as the field drove off Turn 4 on the 2.66-mile oval to complete Lap 27 of the 117-lap Aaron's 312 race. The Nextel Cup star suddenly darted up the banking as he prepared to pass Casey Mears for the lead. Two-time Cup champion Tony Stewart, in third, followed and appeared to hit Busch's car. Busch then bounced off the car driven by Mears and turned across the track and into the wall. Busch's car was on its side as it struck the outside barrier, then skidded on its roof down the banking and onto the grass infield, where it began barrel-rolling as flames erupted from under the hood. Stewart and Mears were both able to continue." Shouldn't the real News have been something more like: "Today, a car going over 200 miles per hour struck a concrete wall and slid on its hood for several hundred feet before it tumbled through a series of barrel rolls while on fire... the driver climbed out the window moments after it came to a halt; he was able to walk away under his own power with little more than a headache and a sore shoulder"? Seriously, if a car can endure a crash like this and leave the person inside it completely uninjured, isn't that far more important to the average person's life than who won a race or leads in some idiotic points standings? Imagine going down the highway in your Toyota Camry and having a head-on collision with another car. To match the force of going 200 miles an hour into a concrete wall as Mr. Busch did, you would have to be going approximately 90-100 miles per hour straight into an oncoming car of equal weight which was going 90-100 miles per hour in the opposite direction. Who here thinks if that happened, that they and the driver of the other car would each be able to climb out their driver's side car window to walk over to each other and exchange insurance information while waiting for the police to arrive with accident report paperwork?! If an accident like that ever happened - you would be so dead, the other driver would be so dead... heck, your families would be lucky to find enough pieces of you to fill a shoe box for your burials. I understand that NASCAR vehicles are specially made race cars built to go excessive speeds and constructed better than consumer cars. I know that they are far more expensive than consumer cars could ever be for mass market appeal - but if one of them can handle 200 miles per hour into a concrete wall and several flaming flips... can't we reach a point where consumer cars can handle the standard 60-70 mile per hour accident without the driver having to spend weeks in the hospital eating through a straw? It would be nice if the "News" at least examined the issue and tried to find out what consumer car crash standards differ so widely from race cars and investigated what improvements could in fact be made to the safety of the vehicles most people drive.... instead of worrying so much about how this will affect the standings of this year's NASCAR leader board. Is Alec Baldwin’s Daughter a Pig? Who cares! You may have heard of Alec Baldwin. He is an actor. Some people think he is a very talented actor. He apparently has a daughter and he is embroiled in a custody battle with his ex-wife who happens to be a model named Kim Basinger. If you know all of the things mentioned in the prior paragraph you may want to consider starting a class action lawsuit against any number of media outlets that have caused you to waste your mental resources learning these facts of infinitely small importance. Your brain, no matter how bright you are and how well exercised it is, has a limited amount of memory space within it on a fundamental level. Just like your computer hard drive being filled up with email spam or junk files your idiot relative from the boonies sends you as chain letters, your brain itself can become overloaded with meaningless Alec Baldwin drama plot points to a level after which it fails to handle meaningful information as effectively as it should. How is the media's deterioration of your mental capacity any different from an asbestos manufacturer's deterioration of your lung capacity? Put simply - it isn't, and it should be just as actionable in our legal system. The public airwaves do not differ from the public air to such an extent as to protect one polluter and not another. Warning - The Following Video Clip Will Destroy Approximately 20megabytes of your brain capacity irreversibly once you watch it The video clip above and others like it should all be marked with a Surgeon General warning. In fact, anything produced as part of the TV show The View should come with a warning in advance and should only be accessible to adults over the age of eighteen. If you think adult movies, cigarettes, alcohol, firearms or violent video-games are not suitable for minors; how in the world can you reconcile that viewpoint with the idea that children of any age are allowed and in fact encouraged to sit in front of a TV set each day watching "safe harbor" programing like The View so that they can brush up on their knowledge of Alec Baldwin blunders when they could instead be doing something far better with their time: like getting drunk while smoking in bed holding a loaded handgun and watching a porno movie playing wide-screen on their television. You may think I'm being sarcastic but in fact I am not. Sarcasm would require "A cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound" according to Dictionary.com and I assure you there is nothing ironic meant by what I have written. Given a choice between growing old in a world run by people who grew up learning about video-games, human sexuality and the joys of being drunk - or a world run by people who know what Alec Baldwin called his daughter during an irate private phone call, I would definitely prefer the horny drunken smokers were given the chance to lead for a while. Moyers Unravels The Media Buying The War With all the idiots pretending to work in the News these days and the attempt NewsStuck makes to highlight their utter failure as journalists, this post is being published as the carrot that needs to compliment the use of any stick. There are in fact a few quality people left in the decaying media and overlooking their efforts would be as big an error on our part as ignoring them has been on the part of most mass media organizations. This is neither a "left or right", "liberal or conservative" nor "regional" distinction as the News would have you believe. The distinction is one of work ethic, integrity and loyalty to the consumer instead of the sponsor. Rare examples can be found in very different political ideologies, cultures and nationalities. No group has a monopoly on the desire to seek the truth and to report it. As two current examples of quality journalists, I suggest you review the works of George Will (a noted conservative) and Bill Moyers (a noted liberal). Neither is better than the other, neither is in competition with the other. That is a key point. Quality journalism is not about competition between journalists, there is no cap on the number of journalists who may be deemed to be of quality, the competition most believe they are in is purely born of the business aspect of our failed media. What inspired this blog entry was a new television report created by Mr. Moyers called "Buying The War" which will be airing on April 25th on PBS (check local listings for show times). The production should get a lot more attention than it has so far, it should be lauded with all kinds of awards - not because it is for or against the war... but because it takes an earnest look at the run up to the war and examines the information which was presented to the public the way the entire media should have examined it the first time around. The program is approximately 90 minutes in length and includes interviews with many noted journalists whose track record shows they should have been given a louder bullhorn years ago when the public was too busy listening to idiots who did little research and even less true analysis. This look back should be required viewing of any journalism ethics course because more than anything else it demonstrates the real responsibility that an apathetic and lazy media organization takes on when failing to do its duty on behalf of its viewers, listeners and readers. Companies like Tribune, News Corp, ABC and most of the others do not merely deserve a bad grade. They fell down on the job like drunken janitors trying to sleep off their hangover in the broom closet during the work day and their stupor has had real consequences. In fact, they have as much blood on their hands as the administration that metaphorically poured them drinks and bought them hookers the night before the war began. Watch Moyers' work, he is one of the few men in media whose work can considered as both a noun and a verb. Report On The Hero Not The Villain! A heinous act of tragic proportions took place last week on the campus of Virginia Tech. Yes, we all understand that. It should have been reported on quickly and completely. Instead the media decided to report on it quickly and with an eye toward the prurient interest in evil that they think sells newspapers and television advertisements. For every one or two news stories about the facts of what happened there have been a dozen or more ghoulish attempts to retrace the steps of the scumbag who did these acts. The media made sure we all knew the gunman's ethnicity, name, appearance... hell they even went out of their way to tell us his grade point average. Why give this lunatic the publicity he obviously was after and why embolden other maniacs with similar delusions? I will not publish his name, a single fact about him or link to any story including information about the life and times of this dirtbag. When professional sports stopped showing video of idiots who ran out onto the field of play during a televised event (to get some face time in the media), the number of people choosing to step over the railings and out onto the turf dropped dramatically. Hasn't any responsible party in the media made the logical inference that reporting on the life and favorite ice cream flavors of a lone gunmen breeds more attention seeking lone gunman? Meanwhile the one person in this entire story who truly distinguished himself was Liviu Librescu. Ahh yes, if you are like most people you haven't the slightest idea who this great man was. You also have no idea what he did during a defining moment in the lives (or deaths) of dozens of teenage collegians who may go on to do great things one day in part because he selflessly allowed them to. Professor Librescu survived the holocaust in Romania living in a ghetto while his father was held captive in one of the camps. He was persecuted by anti-semitic regimes in his home country until he finally was able to emigrate to Israel. Eventually he gained enough prominence as an engineering professor to become world renowned for his work and moved his family to the United States where he took on a teaching position at a prominent university. Last week he was shot five times and killed by the scumbag gunman at Virginia Tech while holding the door of his classroom shut so his students could flee through the nearby window to safety. In a world where athletes and rockstars are given hero status it is rare to find a real hero... one who should have gotten a lot more appreciation than he has thus far. Instead, the "News" decided to get stuck on the gunman and made the celebrity of this tragedy the lunatic who caused it. Two Twenty-Somethings Break Up. /yawn Proving that the retardation of the media is not limited solely to the shores of the United States, this entry in our Least Newsworthy Story of The Year contest comes to us straight from jolly old England. It seems 24 year old Prince William and 25 year old Kate Middleton decided to part ways during tearful heart-to-heart talks in the Alps. Of course it must be rough for a man born into royalty to have to go through a breakup with one of his twenty year old girlfriends. Here is a young, reasonably handsome man who by sole reason of birthright gets to walk around calling himself a Prince and living off the taxpayers of the British Realm. I am sure the utter hardship of his life during this crisis of the heart is simply unbearable. It may take as much as a phone call or as long as a few minutes for him to have new girls offering themselves to him en masse. In fairness, if you are in fact Prince William it makes perfect sense that this kind of information would be considered news... to you. The same can be said for Ms. Middleton as well. It might even be relevant if you personally knew either of the unhappy couple. However, for the several billion "other people" on planet Earth... why would it make even the tiniest bit of difference that these two do-nothings split up? This story has been running for three entire days so far and is the cover story on most of the major newspapers in London today. It also has been the lead story on BBC news casts (so much for the BBC being one of the last bastions of hope within the decaying corpse that is today's media). On the first day of rampant coverage the BBC in fact put this story first and followed it up with that minor tidbit about dead UK soldiers which got all of thirty seconds of coverage. The Sun has gotten so far afield of reporting actual news that they have decided to make this non-story their cover's central focus for three days in a row (so far). They must hope this 24 year old boy goes out on a pub crawl to drown his sorrows in his beer... Ooo that would make such a great front page picture wouldn't it? Idiots. Ok, We Get It… Imus Is Satan? The demon spawn that manage the only half-dozen news outlets left in this world are at it again and this time believe it or not their prey is Don Imus?! Yeah, that Don Imus... the radio talk show host who looks like he died sometime back in 1983 and managed to remain on the air for two decades during his decomposition. Why all the fervor? Ok, it seems Imus made an off color remark (pardon the pun), about a bunch of Rutgers University Womens Basketball players by referring to them as "Nappy Headed Hos" and apparently that's all it takes to become the number one news story on every continent. Perhaps if someone said "Iraq is full of nappy headed Hos without body armor" the media would wake up and start reporting on something significant instead... even if by accident! Besides all that, who thought Don Imus was still relevant enough to use the term "Ho"? Hell, when he was chasing skirts women were referred to as wenches and the sport of basketball had not yet been invented. Sure, his remark was ill conceived but the guy hosts a comedy show on the radio that has been doing this kind of humor for literally forty years. Nobody seriously pushed to have him fired during a career that served up the same swill for four decades and now suddenly his throw-away line about a bunch of tall collegian women is the thing most on the mind of the media? Oops, I called them "tall collegian women" - does that mean Jessie Jackson is going to start a letter writing campaign to silence me as well? When I was in college if someone called me a "straight haired slut" on the radio I'd have laughed or called up and replied. The Rutgers team and coaches agreed to meet with Imus to discuss his comment and one would have thought that this was something that could and should have been resolved by the offensive and offended parties. Instead, the media blabbered on and on about this non-saga as it entered its 3rd, 5th or 8th week while blow-hards ranging from the Rev. Al Sharpton to Keith Olberman to Tim Russert continued to ratchet up the faux intensity on the brittle shock jock until both CBS and MSNBC buckled by firing Imus. Meanwhile anyone with a brain in their head is out shopping for batteries - fearing that their TiVO remote will be out of juice when they desperately need it to fast-forward past these idiotic "news" segments. Another tempest in a thimble gets the full attention of every major news network while the important things going on in the world are glossed over with the casual malaise of an Arizona teenager applying her ChapStick. I really can't wait for the "News" to move along and get stuck on something else instead.... |
