Marshall McLuhan Is Killing Us

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community." --Oscar Wilde

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/opinions.html

If you were to watch sports television or listen to sports talk radio, you could be forgiven for thinking that LeBron James is driving the Cleveland Cavaliers bus off a cliff, that Mike Krzyzewski's legacy is now tainted by one bald-faced white lie, or that other  inconsequential moments in sports have taken on the gravitas of nuclear annihilation.

That's because these media have stopped the presses to devote interminable hours of blather dissecting both LeBron James's recent words and actions and Coach K's refusal to acknowledge a well-documented conversation.

"Nontroversies"
King James has, during the course of this ceaseless and meaningless regular season, demonstrated boredom, frustration and perhaps even regret about his team's dynamics. It appears he may have chosen teammates who don't share his singular focus, his devotion to his craft and his obsessive desire to win a championship for Cleveland.

Coach K lied to reporters about his words of admonition to an opposing player during the post-game handshake following Thursday's loss to Oregon in the NCAA playoffs. Cameras clearly caught him telling Dillon Brooks "you're too good of a player to do that," after Brooks fired up a three-pointer and celebrated its success with six seconds left and an 11-point lead. 

The Medium Is the Message
But this is not about James or Krzyzewski. It's about why these mini "nontroversies" flower into hours of discussion. it's about the medium, not the message.

You see, the existence of 24-hour sports talk and 24-hour sports news are far more responsible than LeBron James and Mike Krzyzewski are for the ubiquity of scandal in sports today. The plethora of national sports conversation outlets amounts to a gaping yaw that must be filled, minute after minute after minute -- at least those minutes not sequestered away for commercials, sponsorships, promos and the like. So let's say 50% of those minutes.

Paradox: More Conversation = Fewer Topics

With (the remaining half of) 24 hours to fill, you might think that many topics would get covered in the course of each day. Au contraire, Pierre. Because of the fierce competition, no network wants to be caught discussing any topic not of immediate and urgent concern to a majority of listeners at any given moment. That listener is liable to hit the radio or remote button and find another national sports network discussing the sport of their choice. So ironically, the existence of multiple options has reduced the sports talk universe to football and some seasonal filler. More choices has meant less hockey, tennis, car racing, track and field, soccer, boxing, baseball off-season or anything else.

This time of year, the NBA and the NCAA basketball playoffs join the NFL as topics that sports talk will cover. Consequently, that's all the sports talk consumer is interested in. And the cycle repeats itself.

More to the point, the hosts have to find fodder for their shows. And that means elevating the mundane to critical and expanding every anthill into a mountain.  It means parsing every word spoken by people who are not professional communicators and analyzing them into oblivion. And it means spouting opinions irrespective of the availability of the facts.

What They Won't Discuss
Because they are starved for content, the sports yakkers can never acknowledge the underlying business dynamic or that their subjects are drivel. For example, though they know that the NBA regular season is utterly, completely, without exception or doubt, irrelevant, they must still act as if every contest is a matter of life or death. In fact, the Cavs have clinched the playoffs and probably couldn't fall below the second seed even if they stopped trying. But acknowledging that would undermine the foundation of all the inconsequential prattle about LeBron James and the fate of the Cavs.

The result is disputations over LeBron's enigmatic tweets and Coach K's private conversations. They saddle us with the Johnny Manziel industrial complex and two years of deflated footballs, a discussion that is full of hot air about a subject that is not.  They bequeath us shibboleths like student athletes, division champions, unwritten rules and non-apologies.

I guess it diverts the listener from the alarming worldwide tangle with terrorism, the dispiriting presidential contests and the near-certainty of massive and disruptive global climate change. But anyone listening to it should recognize that sports talk is a highly distorted view of reality -- even of sports reality.