ESPN and the Power of "The Media"

The New York Times has published a series of stories recently about the powerful influence of ESPN on college athletics and college life. Essentially, their premise is that the money offered (and earned) by ESPN to universities leads college officials to do things according to a business model focused on marketing sports television rather than by an educational model focused on student-athletes. I can't see how the argument can be refuted.

from http://sportsmediajournal.com/2007/10/02/the-goods-on-espn-part-1-the-criticisms/

But there is also the way ESPN treats individual subjects, like Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel. First, ESPN led the way in hyping "Johnny Football" is his freshman season, boosting him to the Heisman Trophy. Then, it reported that in the off-season, Manziel had, among other things, taken money for signing autographs in violation of NCAA rules. Then, when the NCAA found that there was no evidence that Manziel had taken money, ESPN analysts debated endlessly over whether justice had been done. They also complained about how much of the spotlight he was hogging -- a spotlight shined almost exclusively by ESPN.

In other words, ESPN made the story and then complained about the story. No journalist individually may have violated any ethical principals, but the monolith of the "worldwide leader" acted irresponsibly.

Replay continued

The Mets lost a game yesterday in the 10th. With two outs in the inning, a Braves batter hit a ground ball to the infield and was called safe by the 1st base umpire. Replay showed that the batter probably was out "by an eyelash," to use Gary Cohen's phrase. Next guy up hit a three-run home run and one player and the manager were ejected.

For the rest of the game, Cohen and Keith Hernandez referred with increasing frequency the "blown call" that allowed the Braves half to continue. This is perhaps false, and anyway is a waste of time and energy.

First, it is not for sure that the film speed of the cameras used by SNY is fast enough to have gotten the call right. The difference in the play may well have been less than one frame, and if that's true then the camera would be not better than the umpire's eye at getting it right. Second, it was so incredibly close that everyone needs to accept that it could go either way and move on. The game was lost by the first pitch fastball the Braves hit into the stands.

Exactly Wrong

Major League Baseball has heard the noise emanating from all the commentators calling for instant replay. It will expand the use of instant replay in 2014, in an effort to "just get it right."

On the surface, this call to "just get it right" is unobjectionable. Generally speaking, umpires ought to call plays accurately. No intrinsic good comes from missed calls. Also, fields ought to be perfect, weather ought not interfere with play, and schedules ought to be absolutely balanced. These things don't happen, of course, and there is rarely any whining about how grossly unfair it all is. (I say "rarely" because I have heard complaints about all of these things before.) To say that missed calls are lamentable is too obvious.

It's the tone of the complaining I can't take, as if these things were intolerable injustices. Not only that, sometimes I see the same replays the booth guys see, and I can't understand what they are complaining about. Missed calls are not really unjust, most of the time. They are "could have gone either way" kind of deals, and everybody should move on.

But MLB got the fix wrong. By allowing managers to appeal calls, they encourage benches to be planning for umpires to make mistakes, and to schedule their complaints. That's not productive. First, giving everyone three appeals is ridiculous -- I have never seen a game in which there are three calls worthy of appeal. Second, the time wasted in these things will be silly, because the rule has a "use it or lose it" approach that means teams will complain just out of desire not to waste a resource. Third, the dugout is absolutely the worst place to judge just about any call, because you can't see jacksquat from there. Finally, the appeal has to be made to a person sitting in a booth in New York. Why?

What the league should do is hire a fifth ump to sit in the booth and decide when a call is egregious enough to overturn. He would have the experience to judge well, and could check all the ones that need checking without wasting time on silliness.

Democracy and the Rule of Law

Egypt burns once again, as the new regime cracks down on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations.

The violence there illustrates once again the crucial distinction -- and the vital interaction -- between democracy as such and the rule of law as such. As long ago as 1776, Thomas Paine argued, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others,  that there can be know true law without democracy. Monarchs and dictators, they showed, rule with no legitimacy because only the people can authorize a government. But experience since shows, no more vividly than in Cairo, that democracy is necessary but not sufficient to a society governed by the rule of law. Morsi and his group were properly elected but then promptly trampled on the principles of power-sharing necessary for any democratic government to work. And so the government collapsed, and we have returned to a dictatorship much like the one run by Hosni Mubarek.

It's a sad time for the Arab Spring, one that I hope passes and allows Egyptians and others in the magrib to find a government that works for them.

Dropping the N-Bomb

Riley Cooper says he does not understand how he allowed himself to yell the "N word" at a black security guard at a country music concert. His apologies sound sincere to me, and his confusion real. At least one teammate has said that Cooper was not an obvious candidate for dropping the bomb, and that he had been a reasonably good teammate to that point.

At least Cooper himself recognizes that we do not live in a "post-racial" world. In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of an unarmed young black kid, African-Americans are a little raw. As they see it, had the roles been reversed, Trayvon Martin would be in jail right now. They have reason to believe so, since Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots at her husband; a black woman is not permitted to stand her ground, I guess.

As I begin to plan for the teaching of Huckleberry Finn this fall, this storm is instructive. The word has power, even with a black man in the White House. It conjures not distant memories but current injustices, and is not easily to be dismissed.

A column published on Foxnews.com (but without an obvious author, strangely enough) had this to say about the furor:

Since I'm not a African American, I don't feel comfortable telling a race of people to ignore an issue they might feel passionate about. What I am able to say unequivocally is that a word only has power if you allow it to have power and we as a society have given the word Cooper used far too much potency and authority during a time of substantial progress in race relations.

Whoever this author is, he is entirely right. But it's not the African-American community that has imbued the word with so much power. It is the pervasively racist society in which we live; it's the violence against young black men and women going back centuries; it's the indignities even the President of the United States must endure because of the racial label with which he lives. 

The "substantial progress" is real, but let's not forget who we really are and have been.