Tag Archives: media morons

The Lost Art of Keeping Your Mouth Shut

It’s always okay to say nothing. That’s a concept we’ve lost in the internet age, where we rush to project our thoughts as soon as they flit across our brains. But really, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep your mouth shut once in a while.

I say this because last night, while Hurricane Sandy was unleashing its worst on the tri-state area, Jack Shafer of Slate saw fit to take to Twitter and unleash this (reverse chronology from top to bottom):

Normally, I assume most people outside the tri-state area don’t like New Yorkers, and I could care less. Provincial hatred of other cities might be the saddest, most ineffectual prejudice there is (think Springfield vs. Shelbyville) and it says more about the practitioner than his target.

However, I truly don’t understand the psyche of a person who would see what was happening to New York and choose that moment to express snide, impotent rage against the people living there. And not specific people, either, but a vague idea of those people crafted in a badly compartmentalized brain.

Fine, Shafer, you hate some mental image of New Yorkers. Congratulations. I have zero interest in changing your mind, but is it too much to ask that you wait a day to express this thought? At the exact same moment I read his first dismissive tweet, I saw a news report about two children who were killed by a falling tree up in Westchester. Excellent timing, professional journalist.

As I write this, houses are still burning out in Breezy Point. Neighborhoods in southern Queens and Brooklyn are still under 6 feet of water. Parts of Staten Island and the Bronx were hit just as bad. People have lost homes, and for the most part they’re not the kind of people who have the means to just shrug and rebuild. If that does nothing for Shafer, I can assure him the storm also hit New Jersey and Connecticut hard. Houses destroyed, whole towns flooded and possibly more if levees don’t hold out, power out for who knows how long. I don’t know if those states have been too polluted by their proximity to New York to earn his sympathy.

Tragedy isn’t a contest. When something bad happens, there’s zero point in trying to determine if this Bad Thing is better or worse than the last Bad Thing. There’s no award given out for Best Reaction to Horror to the people involved. In any disaster, there are heroes and there are crappy people, because there are humans. Actual humans. Try to remember that when you’re sitting at a keyboard.

A tweet Shafer wrote later (the last one he wrote, at this moment) indicated he was without power in the DC suburbs. So maybe he didn’t see all the images of destruction that I’ve seen in the last 24 hours. That’s still no excuse for his reaction. As a journalist, Shafer should know that if you don’t have all the facts, you can always keep your stupid mouth shut. The internet will manage to go on without your uninformed, hateful garbage, I promise you.

Different people react to tragedy differently. Some feel compelled to help, others joke to deal with their terror. If your reaction is to sneer at the people who are in harm’s way, I feel sorry for you, and anyone who may be in your life.

Media Turns Its Attention to Other Tiny Bands of Kookadooks

On Wednesday, the collective American media pledged to cover a more diverse selection of incredibly small groups of maniacs. The move came after several weeks of unblinking coverage of Rev. Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Church in Gainesville, Florida and their plans to burn the Koran, despite the church’s miniscule membership.

“It’s a basic matter of fairness,” said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger. “We’ve spent a ton of time reporting on a church with a congregation of 50 people, who not only want to burn the Koran but think their Christian god is telling them to do it. So we have to give equal time to comparably sized, comparably insane religious sects. We’ve already sent two reporters to Des Moines, where there’s a tiny cult that worships Jim Backus.”

Shortly after the Times‘ announcement, other news organizations followed suit. USA Today is planning a three-part series on a temple in Galveston, Texas dedicated to the monster truck Bigfoot, while MSNBC has prepared an hour-long special about a church in Bakersfield, California that believes Jesus Christ was made of fudge.

“When compared to the total US population, 50 people is an infinitesimally small, statistically insignificant number,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “That’s only slightly less than the number of people who believe Jamie Fahr is the antichrist. Which is why I’ll be interviewing some of those people this week.”

FOX News did not join the public pledge, in part because it has already been devoting a large amount of its airtime catering to a small, deranged audience that believes President Obama is a Muslim.

Scratchbomb Salutes a True American Hero

As I wrote in a recent post, the word “hero” is thrown around a bit too freely in the sports world. However, I heard a true sports hero this weekend.

As I was scooting around on Super Bowl Sunday, I listened to Mike Francesa’s “The NFL Now” program in the car, because my brain hates my ears. My beef with Francesa is well documented. Up until this year, most of that beef was confined to his agenda-driven conduct during the baseball season. I still found his football work to be at least listenable.

But as the Jets made an improbable playoff run, he dismissed all of their accomplishments in the same snide, condescending manner he uses to talk about the Mets. When they made the postseason, it didn’t count because the Colts and Bengals didn’t try in weeks 16 and 17. When they beat the Bengals on the road, it was because of Cincinnati’s mistakes. When they beat the Chargers on the road, again it was no big deal the Jets had taken down one of the best offenses in the NFL on their home turf.

Did the Jets draw an enormous amount of luck to get as far as they did? Of course. But who cares? The sheer improbability of all should have been enjoyed for what it was by anyone unlike Francesa, who traffics in misery for a living. It was a sickening, transparent attempt to both tweak Jets fans and get fans of other teams to cheerlead him.

The most frustrating thing about Francesa is that his medium (radio) doesn’t allow for any kind of counterpoints he doesn’t want to hear. If he wrote for a newspaper or a web site, you could comment on his completely faulty reasoning. Instead, he only welcomes callers who will kiss his ring.

On the rare occasion someone who disagrees with him gets on the air, Francesa merely screams at the poor guy until he gives up. I heard one call a few weeks ago where a reasonable caller accused Francesa of discounting the Jets because he didn’t like them, and because their continued success made him look stupid. Francesa’s voice got louder and louder with each response, and his counterpoints made such insane logical leaps they could only be explained by quantum physics. Eventually, the man on the phone couldn’t get a word in edgewise and had to abandon ship.

Radio also being an ephemeral medium, Francesa doesn’t get called out when he makes off-the-cuff, borderline slanderous remarks. Or when he just gets things wrong, like mispronouncing the name of Colts head coach Jim Caldwell. Throughout the football season, Francesa has referred to the Indianapolis coach as CaRdwell. Not once, or twice, or even a few times. All season long.

But yesterday morning, some brave, genius soul managed to get on the air with Francesa. This man not only called him out on his idiocy, but also made Francesa look like even more of an imperious buffoon than usual, as he mumbled he didn’t “have time” to bother with getting Caldwell’s name right because it was early on a Sunday morning. Yes, you work a whole 30 hours a week–when could you possibly look up the actual name of the AFC champion’s coach?

God bless you, Rich in Massapequa. A man can stand up!

Hat tip to the hilarious @MikeFrancesaNY for the YouTube link.