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Fox Sport's Jay Glazer is one of the best NFL reporters in the business - he breaks stories about the latest trade or controversy with regularity. But his success is due, at least in part, to his questionable journalistic approach: he's close friends with many of the players and coaches he covers.
This piece was really long and boring, not up to your standards.
I've had to shut off the radio multiple times during M. Pesca's hijacking of OTM. He only sounds knowledgeable interviewing sports figures.
He's HORrible! Part of a quote from his interview when he was talking about the Subway guy: "Luckiest SOB alive... "Used to be 400 pounds, now he's skinny, he GETS WOMEN..." What?!?! GETS women? Gack. Sickening and NOT something I want to hear on NPR, for Pete's sake. You can hear that every day all over the place. Jay is one of those pig football player/athletes who never outgrew college. Why was he even interviewed? Offensive and stupid.
Bentley, I'm with ya. Who IS this guy?
Ugh! Not again, please! So someone got ahold of some tape that he shouldn't have, that was kind of interesting for the five seconds it ran. I couldn't care less about who's popular enough to star in a Subway commercial. That's not coverage of media if it's even news in its own right.
Edit: Never again, please!
I really enjoyed this interview and the guest's insights. I was miffed to learn that Mike is only subbing. Bob and Brooke wouldn't have had the courage to do this story and certainly wouldn't have made it interesting. Moreover, Bob favors opinion-based hatchet jobs when it comes to anything Fox.
Wow. OTM has now done a puff piece on a sports journalist. And guest what? It was put together by NPR's own sports journalist!! What a shocker!
This was a piece that briefly touched on a variety of media issues (i.e. responsibility of reporters to editors, the role of competition in compromising best practices, the relationship between journalists and their subjects, the notion of media celebrity in the absence of major achievements), and yet it failed to explore any of them. Instead, it just provided an forum for the subject to...to...well, I can't quite determine what the point was.
I could be glib and try to blame this on the nature of the sports media, where the primary subjects of interest are the people in the area being covered, rather than real issues. I could say that sports coverage is personality and small anecdote driven, rather than driven by thoughtful examination of relationships between various issues, events and society at large. I could write of this piece being an example of typical sports journalism, simply using a sports media figure as the subject. I could say that Mr. Pesca applied his craft has he understands it to the the topic of OTM.
But that would be wrong.
Some sports journalism is deeper than that, and seeks to go beyond personalities and entertainment. Most of NPRs sports coverage goes beyond that. WBUR's Only a Game did (does?) a whole hour week of high quality journalism, with pathos, depth and content, in addition to being entertaining.
So where does that leave us? What excuses this miserable waste of listeners' time and supporters' money?
Well, given the quality of this weeks' show, and the unique difference in this weeks' show, I think that the explanation is very clear. As for an excuse? Well, I look forward to hearing what OTM has to say with its regular team.
boooooooooring
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