Trying to win the race to be first made the nice guy finish last when the 24-hour news cycle reared its ugly head.
Matt Painter heading to Mizzou was the soup du jour for sports pundits, especially those in West Lafayette, Indiana, and Columbia, Missouri, was all over the airwaves and Twitter feeds, with leads from covert sources and counter updates from both sides of the fence flying.
At about 11 AM Bernie Miklasz, one of the better reporters in the country and a guy that has repeatedly kept St. Louisans in the know about all things sports for decades, reported an unofficial official report that Painter was coming. It's now 5:30...and he's not coming.
Now, nobody knows whether Bernie's source inside the Mizzou athletic department was correct in saying that Painter had accepted the Mizzou job. Maybe Bernie got some bad information. Or maybe Painter was ready to come to Columbia, and then changed his mind. Maybe he never cast his lot with Mizzou and was always going to stay in West Lafayette. Only a few people will know for sure, and I'm going to go ahead and assume none of those few are reading this blog.
What we do know is that because of the Internet, specifically Twitter and messages boards on sites like stltoday.com, this whole mess became, well, a mess. Bernie and the rest of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch led everybody to believe that this was a slam dunk. Instead, for some people, this turned into a sloppy turnover. A guy that has years of credibility has now mislead a fanbase (one that, like most others, can become very rabid) and given away all those points he'd built up.
The Post-Dispatch even published a story called "Mizzou didn't steal Painter, it attracted him". The link now leads to this story. The story led off with a line about how people will look back at how Mizzou was able to get Painter to sign, as if it was already done. That is irresponsible.
To be fair, Bernie work today came with the caveat that nothing was official. But that's not enough. The Internet has made it so there is less accountability among journalists. Think about how this would have played out before the Internet. This morning we would have woken up and read a story about how Painter and Mizzou AD Mike Alden were to meet in Florida. Then, tomorrow we would have woken up to news that Painter was staying in Purdue. That's it and that's all. Simple and easy, nobody's reporting getting questioned, no fanbases taken for a roller coaster ride of emotions.
Now, I'm not saying Bernie necessarily did anything wrong, especially with taking into account the aforementioned points about us laypeople not really knowing went on behind closed doors. Perhaps the only concrete thing to come out of today's media maelstrom is that always being able to devour up to the minute sports media isn't always a great idea.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)