I posted an article on Farcebook last week briefly dealing with this topic, but I wanted to discuss it further here.
In case you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about here's a quick refresher...In this season's NFL home opener, Fox Sports broadcast the Bears game. During the game they made reference to several local newspaper headlines that had slammed Jay Cutler's pathetic performance in last year's NFC Championship game. The only problem was that the headlines flashed on the tv screen were all complete and total fabrications. None of the Chicago local papers had published any of the headlines that Fox said they did.
In other words, they lied.
Now we fast forward a couple of weeks, and Fox Sports has issued an apology on National Telly, only when you read it, it's not really an apology at all. You see, an apology would have included owning up to what they had done by saying something like "we're really sorry we totally made this shit up, Jay Cutler, please don't sue us", but, being a Fox subsidiary, they offered a "we didn't mean to offend anyone/sorry for the mistake/silly us, we promise not to do it again" statement that sounds like an apology without actually being one...
Let's take a closer look at what they said shall we? The Fox "apology" says that they displayed an "incorrect graphic". Hmmm. Are they suggesting that the person, or persons that created those graphics, meant to fabricate something else instead? Did they use the wrong font? Did they mean to use graphics with other, made up lies instead? I call bullshit. I think those graphics were 100% correct. They wanted them to look like newspaper headlines, and that's exactly what they looked like. What they said was 100% completely and totally fucking made-up bullshit, yes, but they weren't incorrect in the slightest.
Then, as the "apology" continues, they go on to say that when the graphics were displayed on screen, they told the announcer that they were from real headlines, so that when he said that they were from local newspapers, he was merely repeating what he was told by his production team, over the air. They said that was a mistake, and they were sorry. You see that? They were sorry for telling their on-air announcer that the bullshit headlines were true when in fact they weren't, but they weren't sorry that they'd made up the bullshit headlines in the first place. Clever, huh?
But the coup de gras in this sorry affair is the semi-apology offered earlier in the week by a person with the hysterically inappropriately titled position of Fox Sports VP of Communication. This rocket scientist suggested that they were just "trying to capture the sentiment of the game (the NFC Championship game) and used the wrong word." I'm sorry, but what? They used the wrong word? Which one was wrong? I call bullshit on this one too. Here's the deal, they didn't use the wrong word, they were ALL the wrong words because Fox Sports made them all up.
Here's the bottom line, everyone expects to be lied to on their "news" network mothership, but if Fux Sports starts treating their sports viewers with the same level of sneering condescension and disdain that they have for their brain-dead "news" viewers, they could be in for a very rough ride indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment