I know that I put in a lot of time complaining about the media in this country and how they seemingly have no ability to place the emphasis on the right story but nothing illustrates my point louder than the current story du jour.
Yes folks, it’s about air. That’s right air. As in how much was in a football that Tom Brady was throwing in last Sunday’s football game against Indianapolis. Yes, I can feel the vibes. I know that you are all trembling in anticipation to know the outcome of this earth shattering story.
I had first heard it mentioned on some sports channel I had stopped on but I had no idea of the true magnitude of America’s interest on whether Brady had thrown a ball in the first half of that game that was inflated to 12 or to 12.5 lbs. But yes, this is the stuff of which today’s TV journalism careers are built.
I have long ago abandoned network news, mainly because they aren’t about news but about selling soap, but there are a few supposed news channels that I still haunt in hopes of getting informed about material that will help fill the space in this blog. MSNBC is one of them. Today I watched show after show on that channel give large segments of time to a story about air or the lack of it in a football. You say it was a slow news day? But it wasn’t. It wasn’t even close. There were life threatening things happening all over the world that the American media never even mentioned. That is one of the principal criticisms of American media by the rest of the world.
The whole world knows what is happening in the USA because we are an important country and all the media around the world print and film stories about us every day. Our media reposts nothing that doesn’t directly involve us. It spends more time talking about what movie star is doing what starlet than it does about negotiations on peace and war by countries that do not involve us and even some that do. So we, as a nation, know almost nothing of what is going on in the rest of the world. But we do know how much air is supposed to be in an NFL football.
So after waiting for something important to be discussed and getting nothing but air in a football I finally got intrigued. So I watched the news conference in which Tom Brady, the Boston quarterback got questioned by what we laughingly call the press.
Now, I recognize that Brady is a great quarterback, one of the best, but I have never been a Boston fan and so I hung around waiting for the so-called reporters to put him on the hot seat. What a joke. As I said, great as he is, I have no sympathy for Brady, but by the time the press conference was half over I had acquired great admiration for him just because he didn’t take some dummy who had just asked him another mindless question by the throat and shake him until his brains settled back into a functional mode.
There was one brain dead question after another, all asked by people who obviously had no working knowledge of the subject of football. And, of course, like reporters everywhere, none was satisfied by a question being asked and answered once. Each had to have his or her version of the same question. It was hard to tell if they were trying to trap him or if they just didn’t understand the simplest answers, because, God knows, Brady didn’t give any complicated answers. The question: couldn’t he tell that the balls were underinflated was asked about fifteen times and each time he explained that he hadn’t noticed, that every ball was slightly different and that it really didn’t matter to him that there were differences, that it was his job to throw the ball regardless of differences.
This seemingly highly technical answer, was obviously too complicated for the assembled reporters to grasp. Not that the answer would have made any difference to the outcome of the game. Brady could have thrown a flat football or one that had been inflated to look like a basketball and the Patriots would still have won the slaughter by four touchdowns. The gain or loss of a half pound of air wouldn’t in any universe have made much difference in a 45 to 7 drubbing, especially since the Patriots scored 17 points in te first half with the supposed altered football and 28 in the second half with the perfect football.
So this is our media. Pathetic. So pathetic that it made me wonder if maybe I wasn’t just as pathetic for writing this blog, but this blog isn’t about the game or the ball or Brady, it’s about the people who control our papers and our air-ways and who waste that control on how much air is in a ball. This blog is about the lack of coverage that our media exposes us to, on a daily basis, while they cover shit like this. This is a story that should have had a 30 second play on a couple of sports shows but should never have appeared on national news media, even on a day when absolutely nothing at all happened in the entire world. This is why, as great as this nation is, we are one of the most uninformed in the world and that’s pathetic.