As I understand it I personally offended one of you guys by saying this is whining, and furthermore should say it to your face and bring a lunch.
I won't even claim that I would LOVE to say it to your face, with or without a lunch. I don't want to do anything of the kind. I'm 45, out of shape, and way too much of a wuss to go meet somewhere between virginia and massachusetts to have a fight over a messageboard.
But sticking with this somewhat hamstrung (bbs) medium, allow me to point out the following:
- The real media are imperfect
- The sports media are typically even lazier (i.e., less perfect) than the real media
- You have picked out one guy who most often attempts to sell papers by staking out the position he stakes out.
- It is a given that a reporter will fill out just about every possible niche in scandal reporting, within a narrow spectrum defined by the breadth of the "pack"
- The "pack" is now discovering the "everyone does it angle." So now everybody is doing the "everybody does it stories." Your buddy Tomase might do one, who knows.
But the most comical point here is that I really had no idea about the Herald and Tomase's opinions prior to reading threads here about boycotting them.
I also read the links there, to the Globe, etc. etc. etc. It seems to me that you can get - gasp! - opinions you disagree with by reading them. I value their availability. I think one makes oneself a narrowminded ignoramous by only reading what one agrees with.
I'll save everybody the trouble of invoking phrases about the Nazis, etc. As a matter of fact, I've read a fair amount of Nazi "theory", as well as Commie theory, and a variety of religious theories, which in our own increasingly "faith-based" climate are more pernicious, in that we are predisposed to take them seriously.
The words themselves are not dangerous; but reporters are not, in fact, somehow mimicking some sort of march toward totalitarianism. They are simply doing their jobs in such a way to present one side of the story, the side that is most likely to sell. They will lurch over to the other side of the story, to the extent that that side sells.
BUT THINK ABOUT IT: Where can the "pack" eventually land? The side where there's "nothing to the scandal?"
Who the hell wants that story?
So anyway, for some reason we've fixated on Tomase. I've read one or 2 of his columns, and they sort of wash over me as part of the general anti-Pat tide. Big deal.
What I don't get is being so bent out of shape about it that you start this "boycott" that nobody is really doing.
I keep seeing "I heard from this other source something the evil Tomase said," or "heard Tomas on this or that radio station..." And we see people saying he said this or that but won't provide a link because by God there's a boycott on!
Well , I don't much care about this Tomase character, and being from Virginia, don't really differentiate the two Boston papers. I was born up there, I don't live up there.
But now I see all these terrible things having to do with Tomase and the Herald! Well, by God, I want to see what's being said about the Pats! And from the looks of things, everybody else does too, if only to condemn and re-boycott it! You're giving these guys more press by boycotting them than you would by ignoring them.
What can I say, knock yourself out. It just doesn't make sense to me.
PFnV
