Archive for the ‘Media Culpa’ Category

A Theory On Bill Simmons’s Theory

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Bill Simmons, Grantland, Martin Luther King Jr., Media Culpa, Memphis, Memphis Grizzlies, National Basketball Association, San Antonio Spurs on May 30, 2013

bill-simmonsGrantland columnist and ESPN analyst Bill Simmons visited Memphis last week to watch the NBA Western Conference Finals between the hometown Grizzlies and the San Antonio Spurs. The way this match up went was best described by SB Nation’s Spencer Hall.

The Spurs played out the series like landlords overseeing an eviction.

Simmons, it seems, saw things a bit differently. During his BS Report podcast on Wednesday, he spoke about his experience in the city and the effect that Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination had on the people of Memphis – (!) – to Jalen Rose, who may or may not have been holding a baseball bat at the time:

I didn’t realize the effect [the King assassination] had on that city.

…

I think from people we talk to and stuff we’ve read, the shooting kind of sets the tone for how the city thinks about stuff. We were at Game 3. Great crowd, they fall behind and the whole crowd got tense. It as like, ‘Oh no, something bad is going to happen.’ And it starts from that shooting and it’s just that mindset they have.

Ugh.

I’m a firm believer in using sports as a means of examining larger social issues. In doing so, we look at the small and familiar to gain a better understanding of the big and unfamiliar. I’m not so sure about reversing that stream because it inevitably reduces whatever “the big” represents. Sports are so drastically unimportant that using something of enormous importance like the assassination of Martin Luther King to explain an element of it lacks perspective, context, understanding and everything else that should inform the most basic of opinions.

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Monday Media Culpa: RIP Player Quotes And Game Summaries

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Game Stories, Journalism, Media Culpa, Player Quotes on May 13, 2013

sportsmediaI don’t really think about it all that much, but I’ve spent most of my life being obsessed with sports. I come to this realization from time to time when I reflect back on my childhood, my adolescence, my teenage years, my early twenties, and then yesterday or the day before, and sports are always there. When I was a kid, I remember waiting with controlled anxiety for the newspaper to be delivered. Upon it’s arrival, I’d dismiss the rest of the paper, isolate the Sports section, and unfold it on the living room floor, where I’d lean over it on bended knee, a supplicant to the gods who determined the previous night’s results.

These days, I’m a little more well-rounded, but I still read about sports more than any other topic. There’s no longer a single religious observance, though. I’m aware of the night’s happenings as they occur thanks to websites, Twitter and mobile applications. I read articles, check scores, watch coverage of games, and even communicate with other fans all over the world via social media to learn new perspectives and gain insight. What I don’t do is wait with anything approaching anticipation for the game summaries that I used to worship.

I already have the information.

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Monday Media Culpa

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Dan Le Batard, LeBron James, Media Culpa, Twitter on May 06, 2013

2012-2013 NBA Most Valuable Player AwardA few weeks ago, FOX Sports columnist Jon Morosi wrote an especially frustrating piece on the unexpected woes of the Toronto Blue Jays. It was disconcerting not for offering a particularly revealing examination of an ugly and unconsidered truth, but rather because it was the type of column for which the writer very clearly had a narrative-based idea in mind, and then sought out evidence to support it, as opposed to formulating an idea based on the information collected. The result was a column steeped in small sample citations, cherry-picked data and quotations from questionable sources.

It angered me. And so, I wrote a piece in response to the original article in the heat of my righteous indignation.

It was stupid, not because I was wrong in my criticism, but because I was outraged over a column about baseball. Morosi’s writing was an estimated thirty-five times removed from anything resembling importance or relevance, and yet it succeeded in making me feel petulance to the point of expression. This is only made more regrettable by considering that such a reaction was quite possibly the very goal of the author.

I thought of this last night when social media went berserk over the idea of the Miami Herald’s Dan Le Batard voting for someone other than LeBron James for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player.

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Ottawa Sun Goes Offside With Cover Photo

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Eric Gryba, Lars Eller, Media Culpa, National Hockey League, The Ottawa Sun on May 03, 2013

CAN_OSThis is the cover of the Ottawa Sun this morning, after the Ottawa Senators beat the Montreal Canadiens 4-2 in the first game of their first round NHL playoff matchup.

It shows Lars Eller, a Canadiens forward, bloodied on the ice after Eric Gryba, a Senators defenseman, ran him over in Montreal’s defensive zone during the second period. It was a play for which Gryba would receive a five minute major penalty and a game misconduct.

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Monday Morning Media Culpa

Posted by Dustin Parkes under CBC, Don Cherry, Duncan Keith, Hockey Night In Canada, Karen Thomson, Media Culpa on Apr 29, 2013


Following a defeat at the hands of their bitter rivals in Vancouver on April 22nd, Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Duncan Keith was interviewed by Karen Thomson for Team 1040 radio. She asked Keith specifically about a two-handed slash to the back of Canucks forward Daniel Sedin after he scored Vancouver’s third goal of the game. Keith condescendingly suggested that no such incident happened.

Oh, no. I don’t think there was. I think he scored a nice goal, and that’s what the ref saw. Maybe we should get you as a ref maybe, eh? The first female referee. Can’t play probably either, right? But you’re thinking the game, like you know it? Yeah, see ya.

Demeaning and unprofessional? Certainly. Sexist? I’m not entirely sure.

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It Takes Two To Tango

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Major League Baseball, Media Culpa, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Soccer on Apr 24, 2013

FC Bayern Muenchen v Barcelona - UEFA Champions League Semi Final: First LegMy knowledge of basketball consists entirely of the most rudimentary understanding of the pick and roll. I learned this in grade nine when my height and running speed deceived a high school coach into believing that I could be something more than awkward and gangling with a basketball in my hands. I was Darko Miličić before Darko Miličić.

I’m not really a basketball fan. I admire it from afar. The coordination. The leaping. The running. The endurance. My ignorance to the finer points of analytics and tactics affords me a certain wonderment as a spectator that’s absent from other sports for which I have a greater understanding.

With the start of the NBA playoffs earlier this week, I decided to alter this comfortable hands-off relationship I had developed with the sport. I wanted to end the neutral observer nonsense, and pick a team to support, hopefully, throughout the next month, and if it worked out, perhaps longer.

Typically, this is a less conscious decision for sports fans. We often cheer for teams based on regional bias, or we support a club because our parents supported that club. Or, if we’re particularly rebellious, we swear allegiance to a franchise because its the main rival of the one with which our parents have allied themselves. I’m cheering for the Chicago Blackhawks because you just don’t understand, Vancouver mom.

My forced approach to the NBA playoffs pushed me to reflect on the differences between watching a sport as a neutral observer and obsessing over a sport as a fan with a rooting interest. It’s vastly different. For many of us who support a team, the individual outcomes of tiny instances within a game that all add up to produce a result are the sole responsibility of the players on the team over which we obsess.

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Monday Media Culpa

Posted by Dustin Parkes under Boston Marathon, CNN, Media Culpa on Apr 22, 2013

BIEytjkCYAEEi4tThe jokes came fast, and in a certain sense, they were furious. Breaking news is broken was the general consensus among the temporary media experts expressing disdain through social media at CNN for the network’s big scoop, which turned out to be completely false.

Early on Wendesday afternoon, multiple reports emerged from several media outlets claiming that investigators in the Boston Marathon bombings had identified a possible suspect. After this brief bout of congruity, it all went strange with conflicting reports coming from different news agencies and, in the case of CNN, from within the same news network. Depending on what article you were reading, whose Twitter feed you were following or what network you were watching, a suspect might have been arrested, identified, not identified, on the way to a court house, or in hiding.

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