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.

Sports Talk's #1 Bias is for Anything To Talk About

A gentleman named Jordan Murphy made the sports talk show rounds last week wearing the mantle of "Aurora movie theater shooting survivor" who is now "trying out for the NFL." It's NFL combine season, which is the fifth most popular American sport behind NFL playoffs, NFL regular season, NFL draft and NFL pre-season.

This articulate and dignified young Colorado University graduate is a "survivor"of the 2012 shooting (in which a crazed gunman opened fire randomly during a midnight screening of a Batman movie, killing 12 human beings and wounding 70 others) in the sense that he was in the theater at the time. He was not shot or otherwise injured.

He had just completed his freshman year in college at the time of the attack. This tidbit about his life would have been available for discussion during basically his entire college football career, in which he played fullback and special teams. He never carried the ball for the Buffaloes. He was not a star. The position he plays is an anachronism in pro football.

Between a Pipe Dream and a Delusion
In other words, Jordan Murphy's combine attendance and NFL quest falls somewhere between a pipe dream and a delusion, depending on his mindset. He has less chance of being drafted than the best player in the Lingerie Football League.

Jordan seems like an earnest young man, but his story is not news. He isn't a shooting victim. The shooting had nothing to do with his football career. The story could have been told anytime in the previous three-and-a-half years. His presence at the combine is form without function.

Wheat and Chaff of Sports Talk Radio
So why was he all over sports talk radio last week? Because the number one bias of news media is not a left or right bias. The number one bias is a news bias. (Don't believe it? Explain two years of non-stop presidential race coverage.) With 24-hour sports talk on at least five national networks, there can't possibly be enough wheat to dismiss the chaff. So anything involving the NFL, a sweet-if-tortured narrative and a good interview subject is worth dedicating a segment to, especially during the dead sports period prior to March Madness, with baseball and football in hiatus and the NBA and NHL still slogging through their terminally meaningless pre-post-season exhibition calendars.

Certainly many of the interviewers are insufficiently self-aware to realize that Jordan Murphy's story doesn't hold together. After all, they're covering the combine, for god sakes. There are, however, still plenty of sports talk hosts, producers and executives who know better, but still gladly put Jordan Murphy on the air and coo over his pluck and strength of character. It's dreck -- but they can't help themselves.

They're biased -- biased in favor of news.