Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day of giving thanks for all that we have in remembrance of that very special day long ago when the Pilgrims feasted with the Indians in celebration of the first harvest.
Makes you all warm and fuzzy, to be sure.
Except that day is tomorrow.
Today, I’m not feeling so thankful. In fact, it’s more of a general repulsion.
There’s so much to not be thankful for in the world at this moment. Because we don’t specialize in turkey and stuffing or pumpkin pie. No, sir. We serve up hot and salacious gossip like a master chef. And at this very moment, we’re unfortunately perfecting our craft.
We can’t be thankful for is the sick and perverted folks who’ve enabled Jerry Sandusky and enabled this Penn State scandal. It’s disturbing and we have a long way to go as a society.
Additionally, I’m not thankful for ESPN and their never ending quest to create news. On the flip side of the Sandusky scandal at Penn State, we’ve got the Bernie Fine situation at Syracuse. The following comments are not to exonerate Fine, as I have no idea what happened or what is true.
But something smells fishy.
On the heels of Penn State and a scandal that was a decade in the making, with grand jury investigations and multiple eyewitnesses comes an ESPN report about Fine a week later based on two step-siblings claims. No one has corroborated their story. But now Fine is on leave, the water is boiling hot in Syracuse and all over the nation, people have already passed judgment on Fine based on the raw emotion left in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.
What’s more, many were critical of ESPN being slow to react to the Penn State scandal a few weeks ago. So how do they respond? They crank up their journalistic prowess and go searching for a similar story. Never mind the skeletons in their own closet that have existed on the internet regarding the highly questionable morals of their on-air talents.
Running the Fine story so close to the Sandusky one wreaks of ratings desperation during sweeps month. The facts weren’t in and still aren’t. But public perception is in because of the timing. People are still queasy over Sandusky and Penn State, so the natural reaction is disgust with Fine and Syracuse.
The Worldwide Leader In Sports, along with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, is at the forefront of an era in which the line between truth and rumor is so blurred, you’d think it had been on a drinking binge for three days.
The sports headlines have been rolling like this for years: Magic has AIDS because he is gay! Jordan is a compulsive gambler whose father was murdered because of gambling debts! Kobe is a rapist! Tiger sleeps with prostitutes! Bob Knight hits his players! Erin Andrews was filmed naked in her hotel room and dated Tim Tebow!
Some turned out to be true, some were vaguely and partially true and some were just downright made up.
But we don’t care about what it turned out to be. We don’t blame whoever first inaccurately reported it. We just want the dirt. The details. We want to know who’s cheating who. We have to find out who’s genitals were sent by text message and what Ashton Kutcher told his one night stand.
There’s a little Hollywood, OK! Magazine, checkout line gossip mag in all of us.
And is this what we strive to be? Both as a country and as journalists? It would appear to be that way. And if it appears that way, then it’s the truth, right?
We’ve turned into a nation of gossip rags. Salacious rumors are the currency of the day and we’re all getting rich in this regard. We may be morally bankrupt, but wealthy in what counts the most, baby: information!
Sometimes, the truth does need to be revealed – when it’s actually true. People need to be unmasked when what’s underneath isn’t the perfect image portrayed by their own doing, to the public.
But what happens if we ruin a person’s life? Do we even care? You can’t get that back. Some things never come back – like faith and trust. If you accuse your spouse of cheating and they are not, it’s over. The trust you have with each other is gone and it probably won’t be coming back, at least never in the same way it was before.
Again, the facts aren’t all in yet. Bernie Fine could turn out to be just as grotesque as Jerry Sandusky. Or he could be exonerated. Or somewhere in the middle. We don’t know right now. And that’s the point. We shouldn’t be spreading rumors for the sake of screaming, “First! We reported it first!”
The facts and details in these two stories, despite the same fundamental premise, are vastly different. And the sheer reality that those details are being pushed to the side isn’t just bothersome that we do this, it’s blatantly troublesome.
The underlying theme here is simple: we don’t just report; we tell stories. We don’t just respond, we overreact. We are ruthless savages.
And then we push repeat 1,224 times until it’s been driven so far into our psyche that we believe it to be true.
You hear something enough, it becomes fact. And maybe we’ve been like this since the beginning of time.
For example, as mentioned at the start of this blog, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We celebrate a historic day when European Pilgrims sat down with Native Americans and ate together to celebrate the first harvest and a growing partnership.
At least that’s what we’ve been told. It’s certainly what we celebrate.
What we know the truth to be is that the Pilgrims in Plymouth didn’t have enough food to feed themselves and relied on the Wampanoag Native Americans to provide them seeds and teach them to fish before that celebration in 1621.
Roughly four months later, hundreds of miles away in Virginia, Indians there massacred nearly 400 settlers.
Wait…what? Why?
Had our news cycle raged on back then, there would have been an massive public outcry. “But we just had Thanksgiving with them! How could they murder our people and treat us like that? Who do they think they are?!”
Certainly, our news cycle and current standards would have failed to mention that decades before, natives had be more than happy to trade with the colonists, but by the early 1600s, colonists had earned reputations as, well, savages.
Without this knowledge, may be we would have isolated Native Americans, burned down their homes and destroyed their food supplies. Perhaps we would have tried to take over their land, put them in colonies and converted them to a different religion.
And by beating the public over the head with the images of the massacre and leaving out the reasons why it happened, we would have easily been able to accomplish this.
But thank goodness the full truth came out and people we are able to see how early settlers treatment of the Indians had provoked the attack and we didn’t do anything rash in response.
Wait…what’s that you say? Oh, you mean we did do all that stuff anyway without the media to provoke us?
You see, it’s all about perspective and perception. And it’s a battle this country lost long ago. We’re easily manipulated, easily convinced of what is the truth and shamelessly obsessed with controlling perception and turning it into a coalition.
Tomorrow I will gather around the table with family and friends and be thankful that I have food on the table. I will be thankful of our freedom and those who protect it.
But today I remain bothered by what we are and what we’ve become.
And I will remain troubled that gossip will always be the hottest dish we serve – and the one we gorge ourselves on the most.
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