Oprah Winfrey's documentary on gay NFL tryout (and washout) Michael Sam airs on Saturday night. Secular leftist journalists and gay activists desperately wanted a happier story line than the one that unfolded. What was pitched a Major Historical Moment vanished into put-on-waivers obscurity.
Bryan Curtis at ESPN's Grantland site compared the Sam kiss, carefully choreographed for the ESPN cameras by ESPN activists (what other seventh-rounder has a camera crew?), to Victory Over Japan in 1945:
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Has John Heilemann ever gotten this riled up over the commies ruling Cuba? If so, I missed it. But on his Bloomberg TV show tonight, Heilemann got on his populist high horse to blast the British monarchy on the occasion of the visit to the US of Prince William and Princess Kate, mocking them as "undereducated" and calling for the British monarchy to be "done away with tomorrow."
In Heilemann's view, the real "royalty" on view at the Brooklyn Nets game tonight will be Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Lebron James.
ESPN hosts and guests talk Ferguson and show why they should stick to sports.
During the past few years, the efforts to change the name of the National Football League team in Washington, D.C., have led several liberals to denounce any use of the word “Redskins.”
Nevertheless, a poll recently conducted for the Associated Press found that only 14 percent of respondents agreed with broadcasters who refuse to use “the R-word” and the NBC Sports story that claimed the presence of six protesters was a sign that the controversy is “not going away.”
When The Washington Post makes a Minnesota story a national story, they really want to push it. Take Saturday’s front page story, headlined “Transgender athletes struggle to find their playing field.” Under the color photo, the caption explained “Zeam Porter, who is transgender, talks about feeling devastated while playing on the girls basketball team in high school.”
The sensitivity is so great that a correction (or I would call it an ideological “incorrection”) was issued: “An earlier version of this story used an incorrect pronoun in the caption for the person in the photograph, Zeam Porter. Porter's preferred pronouns [for herself] are 'they' and 'them.'"
The New York Times has a story today about the Diocese of Harrisburg's decision to ban high school boys from competing against girls in school wrestling. This is the second day in a row that the Times has covered this story, and there is nothing new of any substance in today's piece.
Today's news story on the Pennsylvania Catholic high school wrestling policy merited 978 words. By contrast, today's New York Times ran a story on Oslo withdrawing from a bid to host the 2022 winter Olympics that totaled 406 words. A story on Derek Jeter starting his own web forum was a mere 599 words.
The Washington Post's Metro section on Saturday carried the headline "Redskins fans say 'Daily Show' misled them: Showdown with Native Americans Was a Surprise." Fans were set up for an ambush to be accused of racism, or loving a racist mascot.
In other words, once again, Jon Stewart's Comedy Central crew lied their faces off to an interview subject they wanted to mock. But this time, the liberal media didn't let it slide. Reporter Ian Shapira laid out just how much Team Stewart lied, and then said "No comment" when they were exposed.
What's next, Mika? Giant alligators in the sewers of New York City? On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski perpetuated the hoary urban legend that domestic violence spikes on Super Bowl Sunday.
Brzezinski's blunder came in the context of the panel's discussion of the NFL's domestic violence mess. Arguing that football is a violent game and that "there's a connection" with what happens at home, Mika continued, "domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday. We've seen the numbers. Why is that?" Actually, Brzezinski has apparently not seen the numbers, since that myth has been thoroughly debunked, often by organizations fighting domestic violence, as here, here and here.
Jason Howerton at The Blaze passed along this nugget from the CBS New York website: sports radio host Craig Carton, whose show with Boomer Esiason airs on the CBS Sports Network on cable, laid into the NFL following Peter King’s report that the NFL lobbied teams to pick up openly gay defensive tackle Michael Sam after he was released by the St. Louis Rams. They couldn't stand the "nightmare scenario" of Sam not making a team.
Carton called out the league over the plea that Sam and others pushed that he should be given a chance on the football merits, not some sort of gay affirmative action program:
With less than an hour to go until kickoff on the 2014 NFL season, NBC Sports kicked off a new season of predictably left-of-center political pontifications.
Holding that dubious honor tonight was Sports Illustrated senior writer and NBC Sports contributor Peter King, who, during pre-game analysis, insisted that the Dallas Cowboys signing rookie defensive end Michael Sam to their practice squad delivered the National Football League from a “nightmare situation” in which the first openly-gay NFL draftee failed to make a roster. No one else on the broadcast took exception to that line of argument. My colleague Curtis Houck transcribed the statement, which you can read below the page break [LISTEN to MP3 audio here; WATCH video below page break]:
A football game that ends up with a score of 71 to 23 would be considered a wipeout. But when a poll shows that’s the margin of support for keeping the name “Washington Redskins,” the pro-censorship Washington Post tries to find a silver lining. On the day the NFL season begins, the headline on the front page of the Sports section was “Support for name still mostly strong: ‘Redskins’ still heavily favored, but majority continues to shrink.”
As a pile of sensitive sports journalists boycott the name on print or on television, Post reporter Scott Clement tried to sell this puny 23 percent as encouraging progress:
The Washington Post’s Kent Babb is one of those sports reporters who has to impose secular-progressive politics on the sports world, which he perceives as backward. Last spring, he was pushing for “inclusion” into the NFL for gay football player Michael Sam: “If Sam is not on an active roster when the season begins in early September, there’s likely to be much more discussion about whether America itself is more accepting of gays than its sports teams.”
On the front of Sunday's sports section, Babb lamented there’s “No separation of church, college football in the South.” He summarized that "To many, the merging of cultural forces feels natural; to others, the most stark instances are uncomfortable — maybe even inappropriate." Babb began with Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze: