Anti-media rant featuring Keyshawn Johnson
I have much animosity towards periodic, mainstream media, which should probably extend logically to the consumers of “the media” as they drive the demand which drives the media to do nearly all of the things that they do that causes me to dislike it so much.
I mention this, because I was watching an interview of Keyshawn Johnson by Dan Patrick on ESPN Motion. In the interview several issues *plaguing* the media came up.
The first thing that came up is the propensity to exact certain things from people during interviews. It makes sense that this happens, because the media has many strong incentives to get the most interesting or ‘newsworthy’ information out of every interview. These incentives are very powerful, and I feel that they create a conflict with journalistic integrity.
There were at least two attempts by Dan Patrick to exact specific information from Keyshawn. The first attempt was when Patrick tried to bait Johnson by asking him if he had talked to anyone from the Dallas Cowboys. Johnson challenged the question, and Patrick unsuccessfully tried to feed words to Johnson by exagerating and misquoting Johnson. Johnson immediately realized that he was being grossly misquoted and spent a good 15 seconds trying to rebuke Patrick by talking over him saying, “don’t start twistin’ it” among other things. The second attempt is an excellent manifestation of yet another problem that the media needs to address. Patrick again tries to quote Johnson with, “You said that you were apartment shopping in New York…” Johnson immediately protests the quote saying that he never said that, and Patrick returns with “I got it from Shelly Smith who is one of your best friends at ESPN and I have the quote in front of me.” Johnson laughs and returns with, “…Shelly Smith will write what she wants to write. She can’t say that’s what I said.” When asked why Smith would say that [if it wasn’t true] Johnson said, “I think she was joking about the apartment…”
I can’t say I know what happened here, but I can give my opinion, and I think that Smith probably fabricated her part. I also think that fabrication of quotes and parts of stories probably happens a lot. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve heard of it happening to friends and relatives, and I’ve had it happen to me. The press/media has the incentive to do this and they also have an outragous amount of power to do it too. Even when they are caught doing it they simply and descretely publish a correction which will slip under the radar of public consciousness. This second attempt was clearly an attempt to get information from Keyshawn Johnson about his future plans. It failed because Johnson doesn’t have (public?) plans (regarding football) just yet.
This second attempt at extracting information also held the second issue plaguing the press… lies. What do you do when journalists simply lie? This is the topic of a recently released movie, and made headlines this May with the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. This has also made headlines in the past in many major journalistic publications in the US… think Janet Cooke at the Washington Post, Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit at the New Republic, or Mike Barnacle at the Boston Globe… remember any of these? Probably not any of them and most likely not all of them.
Yeah, so there are my two reasons that I don’t like the presses today. They can lack journalistic integrity, and it is often extremely difficult to know it when it happens, because there are many times when they are able to control information. In fact, reporters and media agencies have strong incentives to have a short lived monopoly on information. They do this in “exclusives” or by “getting the news to you first.”
Posted by David under Observations |