Are sports writers allowed to be even more reactionary and brain-dead than the news writers? [url=It">http://www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/story/2009/03/15/ordonez-chavez.html][... would appear so:[/url]
Quote:
Many Venezuelans living in South Florida oppose Chavez and his communist beliefs. The taunting toward the Detroit Tigers slugger comes following recent political appearances in support of a leader who has recently won the right to stay in office for life.
You can read the article if you really want to - but this time, the "Comments" are right on.
I don't know which comments you read, but I fear there are many keyboards bloodied by hitherto dragging knuckles dripping on the keys.
I can't name any sportscasters, even among those I like, who seem very enlightened politically.
A while back there was a cub TSN hockey reporter commenting on some teams's visit (it might have been the Leafs, I disremember) to a Canadian military base in Ontario. The reporter said something about our troops in Afghanistan, "Fighting to protect our freedoms."
I suppose every soldier since the armies of Amenhotep thought he was defending someone's freedoms, but I doubt if that reporter considered whether we'd suddenly lose our freedoms if our military wasn't in Afghanistan.
Well, obviously I spoke too soon. I saw one or two positive comments 5 hours ago, and time has gone on... Here's what I recalled when I opened the thread:
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I saw that earlier. Journalism in this country is in a sad, sad state.
That is cuz the journalist and more important the editors and managers are all right wing hacks with salaries that are also out of line with mainstream canadians. I doubt you would see the same shit if they made 50,000 a year.
After seeing this, maybe the idiots who covered the game on ESPN aren't so bad. They had no idea of the vendetta against Ordonez. When the Venezuela ex-pats cheered when Ordonex struck out, they thought they were actually cheering for Miquel Carbrera who hit a homer the previous at-bat. They couldn't figure out why Cabrera came out so late for a "curtain call," when in fact he came out of the dugout with his arms outstretched as if to say to those fans, why are you doing this?
On the face of it I don't take as much exception to this particular article as I do to most others referencing Chavez. The reference to Chavez' "communist beliefs" was unfortunate and shows the general ignorance by most people regarding him.
However I thought it was reasonably balanced for the most part and I really do not expect a whole lot of political acumen from sports writers. This was pretty much just a cut and paste from the AP anyways.
I went to look for the knuckle draggers and I did find them but I was happy in general with the consensus amongst the commenters.
I regulary read all our papers comments sections and this was not the worst by far. As of this post I would hazard that support was running at 68% against said bloodied knuckles.
I love reading comments...