<TABLE><TBODY><TR><TD class=storytitle colSpan=3>Weekly Affirmation </TD></TR><TR><TD class=primaryimage vAlign=top>
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By Matt Zemek
CollegeFootballNews.com
Posted Oct 1, 2007
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This week, we devote the entire column to the Mike Gundy-Jenni Carlson story at Oklahoma State. Commentary on the weekend of football action--along with a special pair of "citizen journalist" entries--appears in the Weekly Affirmation's companion column, the Monday Morning Quarterback.
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ByMatthew Zemek
Mr. Zemek's e-mail: mzemek@hotmail.com
Long-Form Weekly Affirmation: "Gundy-Gate" Special Edition
Last weekend, while writing about fan-journalist tensions at Rutgers and Alabama, little did I know that the mother of all media firestorms was developing in Stillwater, Okla.
The Mike Gundy-Jenni Carlson saga is little more than a week old, but the Weekly Affirmation wanted to sift through the aftermath before weighing in. If you read the previous week's Affirmation, you'll already have an extensive understanding of this controversy's inner dynamics. But if you didn't read last week's column--and especially if you care about journalism in the state of Oklahoma--you need to take a deep breath, clear your mind, check your fan allegiances at the door, and devote sober attention to this examination of a story that has so much to say about America itself, not just the smaller world of college football.
Before we continue, though, a brief word about last week's Affirmation. One of the supreme ironies of human interactions--not just in the world of column writing, but in all fields of endeavor--is that the more you explain yourself, the more you can come under fire from others. This was the dynamic that emerged in response to last week's column. The more I attempted to explain myself to Rutgers fans, the more they viewed my motives and methods in a negative light. It's a pattern that usually arises in reader-columnist interactions, but it's part of human nature on a much wider scale--it happens all the time. When I officiated recreation-league basketball games over the past few years, my attempts to fully explain calls only evoked more intense anger from the players, who thought I was baiting them into technical fouls instead of (get this!) simply wanting to teach the game to them and promote fundamentally sound play.
What's the point of that little anecdote? When relationships lack a basic foundation of trust and openness, explanations--no matter how sincere, detailed or thorough--will be viewed skeptically (if not worse). One of my main themes in last week's essay was that
time is the enemy of the reader-journalist relationship, and of journalism in general. Despite pounding that statement into my readers' skulls, my inbox was greeted with a number of replies from Rutgers fans who said that my article was ridiculously long and that they didn't even make it through the whole piece. Apparently, they didn't read (or pay attention to) my major theme:
time is the enemy. The whole point of my argument was that fans (readers or news consumers when the subject matter isn't sports) need to take time if they want to receive better journalism in this country. You need to take time to wrestle with the arguments that journalists confront on an everyday basis, whether at meetings in newspaper offices or behind the keyboard for Internet columnists who live a more solitary existence. If you want to offer constructive criticism of both individual journalists and of the journalism industry in general, you need to be willing to take the time to sift through extended essays and lengthy arguments. You can't cherry pick the views you like, and you can't duck in and out of controversies.
With this important point as prelude, then, please take the time to digest this week's Affirmation, and to restrain your emotions until you've had a good 24 hours to truly weigh the various questions that will be put forth in this essay. Readers will produce far more effective criticisms of journalists--and thereby keep us honest and accountable--if they take time on the "front end" of the larger process: formulating precise arguments that can identify weaknesses in journalism while also acknowledging the good things journalists do. If a columnist receives critiques that, while valid, are flooded with raging emotion, s/he will respond to the emotion rather than the content. This will only fuel the sense of emotional disconnect that currently poisons the well when reader-columnist issues are concerned.
With that word of caution behind us, then, let's proceed with an examination of "Gundy-Gate" and the major issues that flowed from it.
In one week, a lot of ink is spilled and a lot of bandwidth is used. Safe to say, everyone (and then some) has had an opinion on this story. For this reason, I'll try to avoid piggy-backing on others' insights as much as I possibly can. But if I had to echo a few of the many voices who have weighed in on this matter, I would choose ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski and Chris Fowler. "Wojo" talked about the climate of distrust that envelops the public's relationship with the press. Fowler--from a more football-specific angle--noted how the Oklahoma State coaching staff was probably frustrated that some degree of insider information (or perhaps just insider debate) was being leaked to the press, in the form of Jenni Carlson. ESPN's pair of pundits helped this discussion because they went beyond the obvious (something good columnists and reporters will do) and tried to unearth the deeper layers of context and meaning that--when explored and confronted honestly--will lead to education and edification for everyone involved.
From my vantage point (and this is something I've consciously written about for the past four college football seasons), the biggest thing we all need to learn--as coaches, journalists and readers (in other words, as human persons)--is that before you can trust your gut instincts in life, you need to fill your gut with ample intellectual and spiritual food. In other words, a gut reaction--while seemingly natural and, therefore, appropriate--must be informed by a deeper sense of awareness that refers to both the internal self and the external world. The more reflection, deep contemplation, and honest examination one performs in life's earlier years, the more one's gut instincts can be trusted in later years. Gut reactions aren't inherently good or bad; the key is that their level of quality will generally depend on the extent of information, reflection and questioning that precedes them.
If you're reading this essay--and especially if you're an Oklahoma State fan, student or alumnus--I need to make something clear about Gundy-Gate: there's no easy answer, no neat and tidy explanation that will solve everything. The only real solution--for you as readers, for Ms. Carlson as a columnist, for Mike Gundy as a coach, and for the editors of
The Daily Oklahoman as caretakers of journalism in the state of Oklahoma--is to devote considerable time to the issues, tensions and pressure points that envelop all of us in the daily struggles that define the world we inhabit. Deep down--and this is something I know all too well myself--the quality of journalism in this country is poor and heading downward. The condition of the journalism industry is critical and worsening. The newspaper business is on its deathbed. Network TV news ceased to be relevant about a decade ago, after beginning to lose its foothold in the 1980s, once CNN entered the picture. These and other similarly dark realities about journalism shaped the backdrop for Gundy-Gate, the perfect storm in which a controversy could emerge from a column that was sloppy but, on a grander scale, fairly innocuous. (More on Carlson's column in a bit...)
The elephant in the room when discussing Gundy-Gate is that journalists are (and have become) an easy target. Why? Because criticisms of journalists are--on a general level--so easy to make... not just in terms of identifying the weaknesses of journalism as it is currently practiced, but in terms of resonating with a majority of Americans on a gut level, a visceral level, a primal level. No matter how conscientious or intellectually enlightened a journalist might be, his or her work can and will be shouted down if there's enough of an emotional groundswell that can oppose it. And while no one would confuse Jenni Carlson with Edward R. Murrow, the point is still a salient one: journalists--flawed human beings like everyone else--deserve the right to learn from their mistakes instead of being uniquely crucified for them. The same is also true of college football coaches like Mike Gundy.
Carlson's column--the one that started this whole mess--was not an elegant piece of work. But while its phrasings were poor (the facts of her column have been disputed by Bobby Reid's mother, but not directly by Gundy, who said that "I don't have to" rebut Carlson's claims), the basic point of Carlson's piece was both reasonable and fairly routine in the world of sports journalism. When I covered the Seattle University basketball team as the sports editor of the student newspaper, I received my first taste of interactions with coaches and players. With Seattle U. being a Jesuit school that didn't register on the larger Seattle sports scene (unlike 1958, when Elgin Baylor led the Chieftains--now the Redhawks--to the NCAA Final Four), I was the only reporter in the gym on many nights. I can recall missing the end of the 1997 Auburn-Alabama game so that I could wait outside the locker room for two hours (some intense heart-to-hearts were conducted after a tough early-season loss) and talk with the coach. Interviews with players never went anywhere; I rarely received comments that transcended the stock boilerplate of the athletes who have the microphones and tape recorders thrust in front of them.
Mindful of my own experiences as a journalist, I can relate to Ms. Carlson, who tried to unearth relevant facts and details about Oklahoma State's quarterback situation, which was cloaked in mystery and mixed signals. Because Gundy didn't readily provide ample information about Bobby Reid's status (as it is the right of Gundy and his staff to do, if the benefit of secrecy outweighs the need to provide good PR for the program), Carlson wrote a column that tried to hint at the story without nailing it down. Under the umbrella of a column (as opposed to a report or another type of piece that is divorced from the realm of editorial opinion), Carlson's work could be fairly described as clumsy, but certainly not incendiary. The journalism was sloppy, but it was properly focused; Carlson's use of imagery was tragically poor, but the larger point she was trying to make was a reasonable and solid one: namely, "Why is Bobby Reid going in and out of the lineup when the OSU coaching staff has made public comments to the contrary? In other words, what's really going on behind the scenes with this football program?" That's a solid, bread-and-butter focus for a journalist; the problem was that Carlson's phrasings and reportage were insufficient to the task she laid out for herself. You could call Gundy-Gate a perfect illustration of the saying,
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Carlson is guilty of a number of journalistic sins, but those sins exist in connection to the quality of her execution, not the soundness of her ideas. She had a good angle; she didn't produce wordsmithing or reportage that were clear enough to convey her angle with substance and power. Carlson made mistakes, but given that her column seemed to trip lightly around the edges of a story instead of getting to the heart of the matter with perfect clarity, it's odd that this--of all the columns written throughout the United States during a football weekend--wound up creating the firestorm that eventually erupted. I'm sure that Carlson herself--like any columnist who strongly feels the need to express criticisms about a situation that isn't being handled well--could have poured a lot more acid, venom and vinegar into a column than what she did on the morning of Sept. 22. As I sometimes tell readers, "if you only knew what incendiary language really looked like."
Once again, emotions--and the tempering thereof--demand further discussion here, because Gundy-Gate, along with other stories that have stoked the fires of anti-journalist sentiment through the years, is a teachable moment for all of us, with implications that go far beyond the college football world. In case you haven't noticed, non-sports stories have magnified the importance of this Oklahoma State football controversy.
Sunday morning, as I set out to write this column, I made a survey of newspapers (through the Internet, of course). In
The Seattle Times, nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote about the risks associated with allowing free speech. A Google on Mr. Pitts could easily turn up that column. In
The New York Times, Jonathan D. Glater wrote a piece, titled "Between Free Speech and a Hard Place," about Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's "double decision" to host Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but then excoriate him before last week's highly publicized question-and-answer session.
In many obvious ways, these two collisions--
Carlson v. Gundy and
Bollinger v. Ahmadinejad--are substantially different, especially in terms of their level of ultimate importance. But in many other real ways, these two battles matter equally, because they point to the same principle America has always claimed to defend and honor: the right to free speech. It's part of this thing called... ummm... errrrr... uhhhhh... lemme see... wait... it's coming... oh, come on, Matt... ooh, yes, yes, I remember now... it's... it's... it's... OH, YEAH!
Democracy!
A figure no less esteemed than Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the alternatives. We chuckle when we hear that statement (for the first time or for the ten-thousandth time), but when the laughter dies down, we have to realize, as Americans, the truth behind Churchill's purposeful and pointed one-liner: democracy--like the human organism itself--is messy, laden with contradictions, and often hard to understand. Democracy--like human beings--demands endless patience, gentle treatment, and the allowance of mistakes over time.
Here's what we need to understand about Gundy-Gate, the Ahmadinejad brouhaha, and any other contentious situation involving the collision of two different viewpoints and all their attendant social interests: no two human beings are exactly alike. Even identical twins have different veins and arteries, will brush their hair at different times of day, and sleep in different beds. Each one of us is a person uniquely shaped by thousands of different events in our early years and, if we live long enough, millions of events in our adult years. To live as a human being is to live in the face of the realization that your thoughts are not the thoughts of others. Many like-minded people do exist in the world, but even within that context of like-mindedness, individual divergences and disagreements will always linger.
Out here in Seattle, I'm surrounded by liberals. But many of these same liberals dislike sports, don't attend church on a weekly basis, and view philanthropy as something you do for arts and culture, not for the poor and homeless. So while I'm a liberal, I'm a lonely liberal because of all my other beliefs and preferences. In many ways, I'd rather spend my time with a conservative who likes sports, attends church, and serves the poor. Those things matter more than political labels that are becoming less relevant and more outdated as time marches on.
I learned over several years--and have finally absorbed into my bones and marrow--a central reality of human life: it takes a lifetime--
if we're really, really lucky--to fully understand and deeply love one person who didn't shepherd or accompany us through our early years. To deeply appreciate even one solitary human being outside of a family member is to know something very special and, dare I say it in this secular publication, sacred.
Once you make that fundamental realization, your life should never be the same again.
When you do arrive at that point of revelation, and you discover just how difficult it is to know even one person outside your immediate family (and for many of us, of course, knowing even one
family member proves to be elusive throughout our entire lives), you should then see the need to treat every person with humility, respect and gentleness. To put this in another but more powerful way,
the way you treat one human being must become the way in which you treat all human beings; the person in front of you is no more or less human, no more or less deserving of love, than any other human being on the planet. To fully encounter this searing truth is to desire reconciliation and good will among all people: in clashes between universities (Columbia) and Iranian presidents, and in conflicts between university football coaches (Mike Gundy) and columnists who make mistakes (Jenni Carlson). What you want for yourself and your family should be what you want for all of humanity. This is, in a word, compassion--unvarnished, unfiltered, free of nostalgia or sentimentality. Compassion isn't about giving a buck or a burger to a struggling person (as good as that is); it's about caring deeply in your heart for another human being and sharing in that person's difficult plight, whatever it might be. Compassion involves feeling the pain of others, whatever that pain might be and whatever forms it might acquire. Compassion should govern our everyday lives--as journalists, as fans, and as coaches or players.
We come to the next stage of this essay, where we deal with this situation so that when a future firestorm erupts--in Oklahoma or elsewhere in the United States--we can respond appropriately on all sides.
I don't think anyone in this drama--Gundy, Carlson, or the editors of
The Daily Oklahoman--is any more right or wrong than the other. Analytically, I think everyone made mistakes while acting with the best of intentions in mind. The problem I had from the very beginning of this emotional rollercoaster ride was unrelated to any one person's actions--including those of Gundy, who backed a player and, for the most part, did what he was supposed to do. My problem with this whole sorry saga is the same problem that always dominates controversies involving the press: it's the system, stupid. The larger structures we have in this country are responsible for shaping--and usually poisoning--the ways in which human beings conduct themselves on a mass scale. This is true because when human beings--on the ground at the local level--feel powerless in the face of larger structures, they will vent their emotions instead of taking the time to change the system itself. This applies to American democracy, but it also very much applies to newspapers and news-gathering corporations at large.
When I looked into this story from a distance and visited Scout.com's Oklahoma State message boards over the past week (disclaimer: College Football News is a partner of the Scout.com content-providing network), one interesting line of argument kept coming at me from Cowboy fans who rallied to Gundy's defense (and berated Carlson): "
The Daily Oklahoman is a pro-Sooner newspaper."
Of course, I have no legitimate basis for judging that statement. All I can say is that this line of thinking was virtually unanimous on the site. The view might be misinformed, shortsighted and just plain wrong, but the mere reality that it simply exists in a wider community should be cause enough for alarm. And in light of another discovery I made about Oklahoma media outlets, I began to realize that while
The Daily Oklahoman has a fine editor (Ed Kelley) who has given some very solid, timely and socially beneficial editorials on various subjects pertaining to the state of Oklahoma (I visited the paper's website over the past week and browsed the archives), one can still cry foul about the larger structures that house Mr. Kelley's editorial viewpoints, as good as they in fact are.
I learned in the past week (it's easy to find out--just go to the
Oklahoman website) that the newspaper enjoys a synergistic relationship with a local Oklahoma television station. The newspaper will report some stories covered by the TV station, and the TV station's nightly newscasts will often involve commentary or reports from newspaper staffers. Both outlets get to display the other's logo, and they get to pool their resources to publicize--and feed off--the other. This recent partnership in the larger media world is being (and has been) duplicated in other cities. I know this because my birthplace--Phoenix--is home to such a partnership, between
The Arizona Republic and the local NBC affiliate, KPNX-TV. Phoenix is a one-newspaper town these days, because the worsening condition of the newspaper business took down the
Republic's one remaining longtime competitor,
The Phoenix Gazette, sometime in the 1990s. In a climate of media consolidation, furthered by a recent series of rulings by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), these partnerships are proliferating across the United States, with the result being more commercially-oriented, profit-motivated news coverage instead of journalism that looks out for the little guy and generally covers the urgent interests of a community. It's usually liberals such as myself who get worked up about FCC hearings and like matters, but it seems that Oklahomans need to get riled up about the same kinds of concerns.
The folks who run and work at
The Daily Oklahoman struck me, over the past week, as people who have a sincere desire to further the cause of journalism. Their motivations and intentions seem to be appropriate, their goals and aims reasonable. This is true of Ms. Carlson, who--to repeat--had a good story angle, but didn't perform her assigned tasks with the clarity or precision she needed. Just as Gundy-Gate is not the fault of any one person, so it also is true that the quality of journalism in the state of Oklahoma is not due to the people who work at
The Daily Oklahoman, which enjoys a substantial advantage in readership over the less widely-distributed (but very dogged and dedicated)
Tulsa World. The problem with journalism in Oklahoma is the same problem with journalism throughout the United States: with all corporations expected to make a profit, news-based corporations are also having to make a profit as well. If you know anything about history--or if you simply saw the 2005 movie
Good Night and Good Luck --you would immediately recognize the problem at hand. It's a severe one, and it goes far beyond Gundy-Gate. The actions of one football coach, and the media-bashing that followed, are but a few symptoms of a much bigger disease.
Very simply, journalism never was, isn't now, and never will be a field of human endeavor that should make a monetary profit. Journalism is not supposed to profit society financially; journalism is supposed to profit people intellectually, socially, physically, ethically, politically, morally and systemically. Journalism is supposed to promote public health and safety; inform citizens (not merely people;
citizens ); explain concepts; expose the powerful; and bring transparency from murkiness, among other things. Journalism, in short, is supposed to be a public service built on trust--trust that is earned with the larger (local or national) population. The very nature and mission of journalism necessarily require that a monetary profit be far down on the priority list, and certainly not in the top spot. In Ed Murrow's day, journalism was still (for the most part) a public service, and his organization--CBS (like the other two major broadcast networks)--had a news division that was not expected to turn a profit; it was expected to report the news and serve the people.
The reaction to Gundy-Gate in the Oklahoma State community is so alarming, then, because the frustrations of people in and around the university have a right to demand diversity in the media landscape in their state. This isn't the fault of the men and women who staff the
Oklahoman, but at the end of the day, the problem remains unaddressed: the multiplicity of media voices needed to fully serve all viewpoints and interests in the state of Oklahoma is sadly nonexistent. Media consolidation and downsizing--the fruits of the poisonous tree known as the profit motive, which is steadily killing journalism throughout America--are leaving Oklahoma State fans, alumni and students without a voice they feel they can trust. This is how structures and systems do far more harm than individuals. We saw it in the particulars of Gundy-Gate, too.
The profit motive that dominates America (not just the business of journalism) was alive and at work in this series of incidents. The way our current structures are set up in this country, ordinary folks crave info on the state university's starting quarterback more than on the state government's attempts to fight poverty. Media outlets devote more resources to the coverage of sports than to social issues of dire importance. The way things are set up in this country right now, coaches like Mike Gundy stand to benefit from berating journalists in ways that will gain public sympathy and approval. Let's face it: from standpoints of recruiting, publicity, economics, and team loyalty, Gundy profited from his outburst. It's hard to knock a guy when he does something that advances his career while causing, on a larger scale, a relative minimum of pain and suffering. This is not to minimize what Jenni Carlson went through; as someone who receives a lot of vitriol and sometimes spends sleepless nights as a result, I know all too well what Ms. Carlson is experiencing. The larger point, though, should be clear: Gundy has just advanced his career on a number of very important levels. By choosing the right time to unload on a journalist who deserved better--and more specifically, by striking the right chord and hitting the right nerve in the larger culture--Gundy is now likely to make his family ever more secure in the long run. THAT is the problem I have with this whole mess.
Yes, it's undeniable to anyone with a conscience and a functioning brain: the way our systems and structures currently exist in the United States of America, people profit from treating others badly. In other words, people have every incentive in the world to be uncompassionate, and have virtually no financial or material incentives to be compassionate. Our American social structures encourage us to be anything but compassionate, to be people who--instead of sharing in the pain of others--cause the pain of others. This is just as true--I hasten to add--in the worlds of talk radio and the other truly corrosive media outlets (usually on the broadcast side; if you think newspapers and print publications are the worst of the lot, you don't get around nearly enough) who unload on public figures. It works both ways (the media dishing it out, and the media taking it), but the bottom line is the same: people are set up to benefit from hurting others.
One could say, at the end of the day, that capitalism is just as messy as democracy: it's the worst form of economic activity, except for all the alternatives. You can't just talk about the need to have democracy and capitalism; you need to act in ways that promote the deepest, best and truest principles of democracy and capitalism while protecting those who are minimized or hurt by the limitations of the two systems. Managing systems and structures is the real way to effect positive change--in journalism or any other aspect of society. If you focus on individuals such as Jenni Carlson or Mike Gundy as emblems of problems (or, perhaps, solutions), you're missing the boat. If you blame individuals for the failings of vast institutions and industries, you're looking at the symptoms instead of the causes. Start looking at the causes.
We've arrived at the final part of this special edition of the Weekly Affirmation. After a necessarily lengthy explanation of many interlocking factors and competing tensions, I will leave you with a homework assignment to carry into the next media firestorm that emerges in America. It could deal with the presidential campaigns, or it could come from the college football world. But whatever the situation, one hopes that people will start acting in less emotional ways, and with more attention to the layers and details that make daily journalism so difficult. If you want to demand better journalism (and, for that matter, better conduct by journalists, coaches, politicians, and all people in the public eye), you need to make a daily habit out of wrestling with questions instead of settling for emotionally easy "answers" that really aren't answers at all. In other words, if you really care about journalism and want to influence the journalists who live and work in your local communities across America, you need to develop a specific set of standards that can hold up under scrutiny and intense examination when a media-centered controversy erupts. A good journalist isn't someone who defends your university, head football coach, or star quarterback in every instance. A good journalist--as a reporter or as a columnist--treats people fairly in times of both criticism and praise.
Want to develop some standards, college football fans (especially in Stillwater and the Oklahoma State community)? Look at Gundy-Gate and spend weeks, if not months, wrestling with these questions:
Would you have reacted differently to this story if Ms. Carlson used an image other than "being fed fried chicken by his mom" to refer to Bobby Reid's attitude?
What if Carlson referred to "eating chicken stir fry with his mom"? Would you have been as outraged then?
How about, "being fed fried chicken by his uncle"?
If a player's attitude or character affects his team's performance (and of course, it does on many occasions), how should journalists balance the need to criticize versus the need to stay out of making character judgments? What are the standards there?
What standards should guide columnists when they mix statements of fact with statements of opinion in the same pieces? Do you even know when a columnist is filing a column as opposed to a game report or a piece of news analysis? How clear are editors or publishers in making such differences readily and outwardly known?
Just what is "an attack on a player" as opposed to, say, "a searing but necessary indictment"?
Was there anything Mike Gundy said or did that was wrong in this larger process? What standards should be applied to the behavior of coaches in sensitive matters such as this one?
How should the editors at
The Daily Oklahoman and other American newspapers partnered with TV stations (in a context of media consolidation and cross-pollination) work to create sufficient diversity in their editorial viewpoints?
If fans boo college quarterbacks and college football players at large (and they do), what are the standards that fans should be held accountable to? Moreover, how many fans does it take to (either officially or unofficially) sully the reputation of a fan base?
If a fan base goes over the line, does that affect the behavioral standards for columnists, beat reporters, coaches and players? On a more expansive level, does the behavior of one group of people justify a shift in behavioral standards for some or all of the other groups?
What is the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion?
What is the difference between a responsible statement of fact and an irresponsible statement of fact? Between a responsible statement of opinion and an irresponsible statement of opinion?
Are columnists journalists, or just pot-stirrers? Discuss.
What defines a good editorial viewpoint? A bad one?
How often do you find yourself disagreeing with an editorial or column while acknowledging that the quality of the work is considerable and professional?
How often do you disagree with a journalist while acknowledging that s/he is competent, professional, and generally lacking in malice or (entrenched, not innocent) bias?
Polarizing media personality Bill O'Reilly: fundamentally professional or not?
Polarizing media personality Keith Olbermann: fundamentally professional or not?
Polarizing media personality Mark May: fundamentally professional or not?
Polarizing media personality Billy Packer: fundamentally professional or not?
Bobby Reid: a kid or a man?
At what age does a kid become a man, and therefore demand all forms of criticism (if all forms of criticisms are legitimate for athletes at a certain point in time)?
How much research and fact-checking do readers need to perform in order for their criticisms to become legitimate? In other words, how many stories must they read from an individual journalist or publication before pronouncing a journalist to be definitively professional or unprofessional? How much time should elapse before these same verdicts are rendered by newspaper/Internet readers (or TV viewers, or radio listeners)?
It's time to take some time, everybody... much more than you might be accustomed to. Time to do your homework and leave emotions at the door... that is, if you really care about journalism, the integrity of social structures, the justice of our systems and institutions, and, ultimately, about the value and necessity of real compassion.
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