Media Morons Make the Story
From the Cheap Seats
by Chris Hahn
Before getting to the details of this article, congratulations are due to the Syracuse Orangemen. After years of being known as college basketball’s top whiner, Jim Boeheim is now ‘officially’ a winner. Coaches shouldn’t need to win the championship to be considered amongst the greatest in their sport, but unfortunately that is the world in which we live.
Ironically, Boeheim’s win came in a game where the opposing coach had a right to whine. The officiating in the game was awful – embarrassing for the NCAA for such a high-profile game. Yet instead of focusing on that, Roy Williams and his classy seniors knew they had their opportunity and could only blame themselves. Kansas shot 40% from the line in the process of missing 18 free throws…just hitting their season average from the charity stripe would have given them 8 more points!
But what really got my blood boiling was the media. After the game, Bonnie Bernstein talked to Roy Williams on national television about the game. The post-game interview from the losing coach is one of the worst things in sports, anyway, but this one gave us a glimpse of what is wrong with the media today. Williams answered the questions wonderfully during such a tough time. It was clear that his eyes were red and swollen, yet he came out and performed the interview that every coach dreads (and several have even declined to hold).
After questions about the game and what it had meant to coach such outstanding seniors, Bernstein asked Coach Williams about the North Carolina vacancy. As she began to ask the question, I (along with thousands of others I don’t doubt) uttered curse words at Bernstein under my breath…what an inappropriate time to ask such a question! Yet Williams gave a very respectable answer, essentially saying that although he respected her need to ask the question as a journalist, as a human being this was not the time to worry about that topic and that he had a lot more on his mind.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t good enough for CBS, because Bernstein asked again if he would take the job at his alma mater. At that point, I was screaming at her to shut up! Did she really think that by asking repeatedly she was going to break him down and get an answer? This isn’t Austin Powers, Bonnie! While few of us would probably have still been in front of the microphone, Williams went ahead and answered the question by telling her that he realized she was fed the question through her earpiece, but that he couldn’t believe she wasn’t more sensitive as a person and set the media piece of her personality aside. As he walked off, he dropped the s-word in the last sentence, using it to refer to the Carolina topic and showing where it stood on his priorities at that moment.
At that moment, in front of my TV, I stood and applauded him. I am sick of the media trying to create the story, instead of just reporting the truth about the real story. Each reporter and network is constantly on a quest to ‘get the scoop’, and in the process often push and prod his or her way past lines of appropriateness. Often, reporters seem to make something out of nothing so that there is something unique to their story. The media has become media-hungry itself. Reporters do not just want people to be talking about their story; they want people to be talking about THEM.
We even saw this junk with the war in Iraq. Reporters have complained that the information briefings are useless to the media because they get all of their information other ways. Guess what guys…there is a reason they don’t tell you more! If someone in the military would actually answer some of the questions the reporters beg to get, some of our American soldiers would be in much more danger. Yet if that happened, there is little doubt the media would blame the military for providing such information in the first place.
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, Roy Williams had a right to be disgusted and use profanity on national television. Most of us had already tried to show Bernstein one of our fingers from the other side of the camera. It would just be nice for the media to get back to where it used to be. I, as a fan, enjoy hearing the story without the reporters trying to be a part of that story.