Even the Sports Media is a bunch of whiners

Via MrSEC.com, a sports media site geared to Southeastern Conference Athletics, comes a whine political bloggers have heard since Mary Mapes and Dan Rather got caught falsifying documents to smear George W. Bush. You might remember that righty bloggers took all of a week or so to prove that one media outlet was lying and that all of the others were circling the wagons in defense of their wounded comrades in ink.

Here comes the Sports Page version:

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I don’t know if you’re as tired of this story as I am, but I’m sick as hell of it.  It’s like trying to wrangle cats.

Everyone is talking.  But no one is talking on the record.  There are hundreds of allegations, accusations, loopholes, slip-ups and full-blown lies.  But there are very few facts.

Yet every five minutes people from Timbuktu to Tuscaloosa fire off a new sentence or two that forces everyone else to re-write their own stories.

Welcome to a world where EVERYONE is the media.  (Warning: It’s not going to be a good world.  At all.)

We’ll try to simplify this mess for you later in the day. 

If we did so now, we’d just have to change it the when LonnieTiger43 tweets some new bombshell later in the day.

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Indeed.  Welcome to the era of the citizen journalist, who wouldn’t even have a reason for existence if the so-called professional journalists did their damned jobs.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether the subject is Presidential politics, foreign affairs, local corruption or college sports. The legacy mass media is the only business in the world where the purveyors of a product think they can climb up on a soap box and bitch about other people doing their jobs better than they are. It’s also the only business model where the businesses scold the customers for not liking the product they’re selling.  The arrogance and sense of entitlement of these people is laughable.

The time Pennington used to hammer out this little diatribe could have been much better spent trying to figure out which of Cecil Newton’s sons had the talent that produced the funds he used to renovate his cult church in Newnan, Georgia.  Or, how about finding out whether two men connected with the Newtons named Anthony Paige—one a “contractor,” the other a registered sports agent—are completely unrelated to each other. Does anyone really believe that two men with the same rather unusual name are (1) connected with the Newton family and (2) don’t have any relationship to one another?  Are they different men who don’t even know each other, are they related to one another somehow, or are they one and the same?

Go do your damned jobs journalists, and quit whining when a part time blogger scoops you because you were too busy whining about part time bloggers scooping you…