It’s that time of year again! The bands, the cheerleaders, the kickoff…and the usual framing as defending National Champions meet their first speed-bumps:
TUSCALOOSA — San Jose State certainly won’t have much in its favor Saturday night in Bryant-Denny Stadium.
The Trojans are short eight scholarships due to academic sanctions. They have a few players who could see action on both sides of the ball against the defending national champions in front of 101,000-plus hostile fans.
Throw in a brand new coaching staff led by a first-year head coach and the task sounds helpless for San Jose State. But it’s that element of the unknown that’s throwing the Crimson Tide for a loop in the game planning for Saturday’s opener in Bryant-Denny Stadium. (Emphasis mine)
Now, it’s not that Michael Casagrande isn’t a fine writer paying close attention to a serious sport; but this reminds me of the time Georgia Tech led Cumberland College 126-0 at halftime and the great John Heisman (for whom the trophy is named) warned his team in the locker room that “those Cumberland boys are tricky” only to watch them score just 96 points in the second half (witnesses blaming sheer exhaustion).
In other words, Saturday will be a blowout. I actually feel sorry for the San Jose quarterback who meets his first corn-fed linebacker in a devastating, ground-crunching sack. The snowball’s-chance-in-hell? Not happening. By the third quarter, Alabama will be sending its freshmen out for scrimmage. But I am not exulting over the prospects of easy victory; I am, rather, amused to note a similarity to certain political reporting.
For there cannot be a case in which one side is full of BS and the other not; both sides must be reported equally. Never, ever in the history of CNN’s AC360 has anyone foregone a fake, ginned-up, not-true right wing story in favor of a fact-based narrative. Both must be reported side-by-side for “balance.” There are many reasons, including fear of the “liberal media” label, but the biggest is that journalists are actually trained to find a horse-race, and if they cannot, to invent one.
Thus, when candidate A says the moon is made of green cheese and candidate B declares that Earth’s satellite is made of rock, that several famous expeditions in fact brought back samples of said rock, and that candidate A needs to explain why they believe such a crazy idea, the normal newspaper headline is “Candidates Disagree Over Composition of Moon.” When party A discusses preexisting conditions and public options while party B screeches about imaginary “death panels” and “keeping government out of Medicare,” the normal newspaper headline is “Parties Debate Health Care.”
It starts with journalism students forced to write their first sample obits. It expands through their first sports headlines and city beat articles. It ends with degreed journalists pretending there are two actual sides to a debate when one side is just making crap up. It happens because there is no news in admitting Alabama will destroy San Jose State. Controversy sells; drama sells. The horse-race rules because the press is biased for narrative.
