Plays of the Weak (For Crying Out Loud)
No Crying In Politics
Okay, “crying” does help if you’re last name is Clinton, but many headlines over the last two days featured the tears shed by Mitt Romney.
Let us not forget, the next President of the United States will be dealing with adversaries overseas who are not impressed with “feelings” or “tears” that well up soccer moms and morning show anchorettes. 
Clinton gave us a teary-eyed reminder of his childhood memories of Black churches burning in Arkansas, even though it was later revealed that not one church, period, was burned in Arkansas during his manufactured recollections. Now Romney’s emotional recall was over Blacks being fully admitted to the Mormon church.
Romney’s tears won’t impress Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bashir Assad, and let’s not forget, they have televisions as well. Enough of the crying. Our enemies respect testosterone. They respect strength. Crying may warm the Ellen and Oprah audiences, but at a time when we’re looking for strong leaders, tears are the wrong approach.
Major League JuiceBall
In the aftermath of the release of the Mitchell Report on steroid use in Major League Baseball, instead of naming names, I blame money on what’s driving players to juice up for competitive advantage.
As a child, I remember going to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox. I paid $1 to get a bleacher seat in right field and, for an additional fifty cents, after the seventh inning could find an empty seat in the grandstands. Those same bleacher seats today cost $26.
You knew who the players were, and many played out their entire career with one team. When free agency ran amok, it was all about the money. Screw the fans. When it became all about the money, players began to seek that edge; not necessarily to help their team, but their next big contract. The Mitchell Report, rightly or wrongly, named names.
Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling put it best….
“I’m hoping to hear a very large legal team has been assembled and that Roger (Clemens) is suing everybody.
“If your name is there, there’s two ways to go about this. You legally defend yourself and sue the crap out of everybody involved or you don’t.”
It’s the “don’t” part that’s telling. The lawsuit silence is deafening, and knowing lawyers as we do, that says something….
Romessica
NFL quarterbacks are supposed to be the smartest people on the field. With that, they should be careful of the company they keep.
Many in Dallas are talking about the terrible play of Cowboys QB Tony Romo after he started dating singer Jessica “Chicken of the Sea” Simpson. She may not be welcome at Texas Stadium because many consider her bad news.
Many athletes date actresses and other pop celebrities and it doesn’t affect their play on the field. Now while Romo is a professional and should be able to partition his private life from his career, Jessica Simpson has done little positive for anyone she’s hung around.
Real men can appreciate intelligent women. I can only imagine Tony explaining to Jessica what a first down was, as she may have thought it the layaway policy at Target.
Tony, NFL quarterbacks can ill afford blonde moments. Jessica Simpson is a walking blonde moment. Watch your blind side.
Commercial Of The Week
The best in self-deprecating humor….
Priceless.
“Citizen Journalists” Are Not The Problem
Reading the self-aggrandizing commentary from David Hazinski, a former NBC correspondent, was almost comedic.
In an op-ed written in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Hazinski goes off on “citizen journalists” and dictates what he believes should be guidelines that they should adhere to.
He has both nerve and selective memory. As a former network correspondent and present associate professor of telecommunications and head of broadcast news at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism, he should know better.
He wrote….
“CNN’s last YouTube Republican debate included a question from a retired general who is on Hillary Clinton’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender steering committee. False Internet rumors about Sen. Barack Obama attending a radical Muslim school became so widespread that CNN and other news agencies did stories debunking the rumors. There are literally hundreds of Internet hoaxes and false reports passed off as true stories, tracked by sites such as snopes.com.”
The question was posed on YouTube, but whose responsibility was it to vet the question, Mr. Hazinski? Maybe the “certified”, trained professional at CNN.
“Following the debate, CNN learned that retired Brigadier Gen. Keith Kerr served on Clinton’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender steering committee. We regret this incident. CNN would not have used the general’s question had we known that he was connected to any presidential candidate.”
– David Bohman, senior vice president and executive producer of the debate
Surely as I could find that explanation, Mr. Hazinski, associate professor of telecommunications and head of broadcast news at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism, could have found that as well.
“Having just anyone produce widely distributed stories without control can have the reverse effect from what advocates intend. It’s just a matter of time before something like a faked Rodney King beating video appears on the air somewhere.”
There’s this great news organization called “The New York Times”. They previously employed a reporter named Jayson Blair. Even though he had an abnormally high error rate, he was allowed to continue on until his plagiarisms became very public. In the world of “citizen journalism”, errors are found within minutes after being posted. Continued “errors” result in no one visiting that CJ’s page, thereby accuracy is paramount.
Here we go with Hazinski’s “suggestions”….
• Major news organizations must create standards to substantiate citizen-contributed information and video, and ensure its accuracy and authenticity.
If it weren’t for CJs like Matt Drudge, we may have never known about a DNA-stained blue dress. If it weren’t for citizen journalists, Dan Rather may have altered the result of a presidential election by his reporting of what we now know of as “forged, but accurate” documents.
The all-important professional media either sits on stories THEY don’t deem important, for importance or ideological reasons, or they miss the “facts” altogether, and Mr. Hazinski thinks it important they regulate citizen journalists.
• They should clarify and reinforce their own standards and work through trade organizations to enforce national standards so they have real meaning.
Speaking of the YouTube debates, we all now know that questions were planted for certain candidates to respond to, on more than one event. The persons asking the questions were also preselected to ask those questions. Is that a practice that would be condoned in one of Mr. Hazinski’s journalism classes? In order for that to happen during the debate, either CNN was complicit in the planting of questions, or they were ignorant of what was going on right under their noses.
Which is worse, Mr. Hazinski?
• Journalism schools such as mine at the University of Georgia should create mini-courses to certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures, much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff’s auxiliaries are trained and certified.
It would appear journalism schools such as yours should offer remedial training for journalists to be given at regular intervals during their careers. That way, a presidential debate doesn’t have to be canceled because there are no writers to write the questions. That, one would think, is something a network anchor making millions of dollars a year could accomplish.
As far as ethics go, most citizen journalists don’t deliberately go out of their way to “Photoshop” pictures and pass them off as truth. Such has happened on too many occasions in the “professional” media. Again, I contend that citizen journalists have hundreds of thousands of potential editors looking over their work at any given time. False stories and pics get by “professional” editors every day, and who is it that catches them and forces corrections? Citizen journalists.
That must really piss them off.
“Journalists generally don’t like any kind of standards or regulation. Many argue that standards could infringe on freedom of the press and journalism shouldn’t be regulated.
“But we have already seen the line between news and entertainment blur enough to destroy significant credibility. Continuing to do nothing as information flow changes will further erode it. Journalism organizations who choose to do nothing may soon find the line between professional and citizen journalism gone as well as the trust of their audiences.”
Tell you what, Mr. Hazinski.
In my humble opinion, it is the professional (main stream) media that has created that blur, and thereby needs more regulation. Supervision, if anything.
Arrogance, that you clearly exude, is the other problem.
Because someone goes to school for something, doesn’t mean they’re automatically good at what they do. If a bunch of those-who-can’t-do-teach journalists are, they’ll create a whole lot of lazy, accuracy-challenged little journalists. Not that all professional journalists are bad, but the impact a few of them can make on the public is alarming.
The one thing that kept these frauds and inaccuracies from taking hold were citizen journalists.
Mr. Hazinski, citizen journalists are not the problem. You are.
Deal with it.
Bob Parks is a member/writer for the National Advisory Council of Project 21, and VP of Marketing and Media Relations/Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. | More from Bob Parks
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