The Prime Directive

You know, I absolutely HATE that I'm going to nerd up football by talking about Star Trek. But the events of the last few days have left me no choice.

In Star Trek, Federation personnel must obey a prime directive to not be directly involved in developing (primitive) cultures.

We need the same with the sports media.

So far, we've seen an event with a most likely natural explanation turned into a MAJOR news story. This story was created out of thin air by... you guessed it, one of the reporters! During this time, of course, there has been limited to no meaningful stories about football or the game itself. We've missed out on essential news over a procedural blip on the radar that has no impact on the game or the league. The media is involved IN the sport now, not simply reporting on it. It has affected the enjoyment of the game for everyone involved. And all the while as this becomes more obvious I see tweets from mouthbreathers like Ben Volin stating they need to grill the refs now. Grill them over what? There is still, as of yet, no real news or story here. There's been no official insinuation of wrongdoing by anyone officially at all.

Then you have people like Shalise Manza Young with the audacity to retweet a Patriots player mentioning the "overflow media" had to look at his nameplate to know who he is. YOU AND YOUR PEERS ARE THE REASON THERE IS OVERFLOW MEDIA THERE. You sensationalized literally nothing to the point that equally inept networks have mistaken it for real news. So now not only is it interrupting legitimate football news, it is interrupting legitimate national and international news as well.

And yet the tweets keep coming. And these parasites tweet each other too. In much the same fashion that created the story in the first place.

This is sickening. This is not news and this is not reporting. If they wanted to become fiction writers, journalism shouldn't have been their focus. Go write a novel instead. All of you.

/vent (sorry had to post it somewhere)

Deflategate represents the crescendo of the social media revolution.

It's the new age, where every idiot with an opinion thinks s/he's entitled to be heard. Why take the effort to think rationally about anything, when you can instantly post your brain vomit on twitter (in less than 140 characters), and feel like a celebrity because your 'opinion' has been broadcasted? Same with Facebook.

It's telling that news media these days regularly cite Twitter and Facebook traffic as measures of any story's credibility (as opposed to popularity).

In this technologically enabled hive, mob mentality rules. Media corps figured this out 10 years ago, and since then their business model involves simply milking dry the tit of whatever sensationalist piece that the proles are currently obsessed with.

Instant gratification and ego boost. How dare you deprive ME? The idiocracy has ripened, and it's only getting worse.

I like to write, and years ago when I was trying to decide what to go to college for, a lot of folks said, "Why not Journalism, since you like to write?" And my response was always, nah, I like to write stuff I can make up. If I'd only known it could be this way...

This is how the media evolved. We, the people, failed to stop them.

I will say this, between spygate and this witch hunt I have learned A TON on how the media operate. If they will screw the pooch so hard on a **** story like this, imagine the big stories they screw up as well? And I'm not just talking sports, I mean national and international major news stories.

Watching what happened during spygate really woke me up as to how inept our media is, this recent joke just reinforced it. Anything I see or read I take with a grain of salt because there is a good chance they are sensationalizing it or have it all wrong.