Monday, January 24, 2011

Football: The Hypocrisy of CBSSportsonline

I live in Cheyenne, WY and have satellite TV...which means I don't get local TV channels which means I don't get to watch football on Sundays. So I have to keep track of the games via CBSSportsline's Gametracker.

Yesterday, Jay Cutler of the Bears came out of the game after one series in the second half, and stood on the sidelines for the rest of the game. Now, I don't know what the broadcasters were saying - if they pointed out immediately that he had a knee injury, but the comments on the Grametracker were all saying he'd pulled himself out, etc. (And of course his replacement, Caleb Hainie, played 100% better than Cutler had, even before the injury).

As soon as he came out, NFL players old and new were releasing tweets on twitter calling him gutless, a loser, etc.

Which no one needed to know about, except those who subscribed to these people's Twitter feeds, except CBSSports collected them all together and published them for everyone to see.

Now today it turns out that Cutler had a meniscus tear. (Or at least, his team doctors are telling people that, whether he does or not, just to take the heat off the guy. I wouldn't put it past them.)

But the thing is sports news today is 90% gossip, 10% news. Anytime an athlete college, or otherwise, is arrested for anything from jaywalking to drunk driving to robbery we hear about. Anytime coaches are arrested for driving drunk, we hear about it.

I can understand that sort of thing appearing on the garbage that is gossip boards, like "Yahoo news" , but on a serious site like CBS Sports, it has no place.

In any event, for CBS to fan the flames against Cutler (whom I've never liked ever since he forced a trade from Denver) one day, and say "Ha hah, turns out all those twitters didn't know what they were talking about the next." is inexcusable.

And we wonder today why young people - or indeed, most people - have no ability to think critically on any subject at all.

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