Why ESPN Beats the News networks

As a political news junkie and a sports fan (full-disclosure: I play fantasy football) I often found myself switching back-and-forth between the ESPN channels of Fox Sports to CNN, Fox news, and MSNBC. What constantly struck me as how the analysis of the NFL, in particular, is more complicated than the politics commentariat. In short, CBS, Fox and ESPN sports divisions have a lot to teach their sister news channels.

The first, and most important, difference is that our political commentary nearly always sustains a logical fallacy: the false dichotomy. Take the soon-to-end Hannity and Colmes as a representative example of the genre. The world is neatly divided into right and left, liberal and conservative. All conservatives necessarily think the same thing and all liberals have agreement too.

At Fox Sports NFL show they have a straight-news moderator (Curt Menefee) with four commentators, each representing different experiences, different prejudices. For example, Terry Bradshaw the legendary Steelers quarterback from a generation ago loves quarterbacks and typically that shapes his comments. He sees most the game going through their hands. Jimmy Johnson, a former coach of renown, considers players on both sides of the ball, but usually presents the coaches as their game planning as the vital variable. On top of that they have two additional defensive all-star players (Howie Long and this season Michael Strahan) who parse the game in yet other ways. Sometimes they agree, but often enough they don't.

Imagine a different Hannity and Colmes then. Hannity representing a caricature of the right, and Holmes of a particularly wimpy brand of the left, but then a hard-nosed intellectual libertarian and, bizarrely revolutionary for TV news, someone from the middle with relatively little ideological commitment (just pro-America, pretty tolerant, and immanently practical). That moderate position, more-or-less, is where most Americans stand after all. To truly flesh the thing out a genuine socialist would be nice and an honest-to-goodness evangelical conservative (they tend to be poorly represented in the talking classes). It would be a jumble and a Minifie-like moderator would be needed (maybe his job could be to call-out the talkers when they misconstrue or fabricate facts. I picture him as part host, part referee (personal foul! unnecessary ad hominem - that's five-minutes of silence Scarborough).

You get the idea. It would be entertaining, I think, and far more honest and less misleading than what we have now. For there is a lot of reason to believe that this false presentation of right and left does more harm than good in our political discourse.

Deep South Dispatch #1

As an occasional feature of the 2-10 blog I will offer Deep South Dispatches. They could be serious or humorous, but either way I hope they reveal something about the South.

True story: my father traded a pistol for a truck. Now, you might be asking yourself, fair enough, what kind of truck was it? Here's the story.

A guy owed my father money. This is pretty common as my father is a bit of a landlord in a small town in the Deep South. On top of that, he has been known to loan money for posting bail bonds, to pay taxes, child support and so. He is part of the unofficial network that rural people black and white use to get badly needed cash. In this case he took a pistol as payment. Now, he's an avid hunter but pretty practical and he find pistols neither handy, sexy, nor collectible. So he traded the pistol to his cousin for a 1989 Chevy pickup (4x4 - I mean be real) with under 100k miles. There is the little matter of the engine having burned up from lack of oil in Augusta, Georgia this summer. My father thinks he got a good deal. And he proudly announced to me this weekend he has found an engine to drop into his Chevy pickup for $150.

So, the guy needing cash got the cash, Dad's cousin got the pistol and dad got another pickup...and a story.

Modesty of Aspirations

Welcome to my humble little blog. My expectation is not to blog daily. (Hardly anyone really has time to write a daily blog much less read blogs.)

I hope to make weekly or bi-weekly posts of my writing and of intelligent, provocative and funny things I find.

One of my mentors use to say: modesty of aspirations. I' ll begin with that caveat in mind.

j 2-10