Questions

 And now another foray into Nerdy Journo Pontification, which means you are excused, Blobophiles. Especially if you have a note from Epstein's mom.*

(*If you're mystified by this reference, look it up. I'm not in a 'splainin' mood today.)

Anyway ... today's pontificating begins with a woman in Tampa.

She's a local TV reporter, and the other day at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers media availability with head coach Todd Bowles, she asked a spectacularly dumb question. She asked, since the Bucs will be playing at Detroit in a divisional playoff game this weekend, how the team was preparing for the cold weather.

Not knowing, apparently, that the Lions have been playing in an indoor facility for, like, 40 years.

Lots of veteran sports journos (including, mea culpa, this one) asked how in the hell an NFL reporter could not know the Lions played in Ford Field, and before that the Silverdome, which are/were roofed facilities? If you don't know even basic stuff like that, how the hell are you covering the NFL? And also, do a little research, for God's sake!

Well ...

Turns out the reporter in question works for a station that apparently once had a three-person sports staff, but decided at some point it didn't need no stinkin' sports staff. It was probably because the fat cats who own the station thought their pile wasn't fat enough, but that's just blue-skying on my part. 

(Bet I'm right, though.)

In any event, this woman got plucked from the remaining litter to go cover the Bowles presser. Now, I have no idea if she'd been sent to a Bucs presser before, or if she had any appreciative knowledge of the NFL. Maybe she had, and did. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her boss stepped out of his office, looked around the room, pointed and said "You. Bowles presser. Go."

In which case I can understand how she could ask such a clueless question. 

(Although if she were any kind of reporter at all, and she knew what she was going to ask, she should have looked up Ford Field before asking it. That part you can't excuse.)

Again, maybe it didn't go down that way. But given this is the era of the Magical Shrinking Newsroom, it's a pretty realistic assumption. And that part of it is on the soulless media congloms who've sucked the life out of American journalism and turned it into a side hustle manned by underpaid, overworked skeleton staffs.

As someone who spent a good chunk of his newspapering career during a time when covering the news actually mattered, it makes me want to weep.

Know what else makes me want to weep? 

That it's 2024 and there's still a healthy crop of lint-brains coming at us from, I don't know, 1950 or something.

One of the most disgusting sidelights to this incident, see, is how many knuckle-dragging Neanderthals have come crawling out of their social-media holes, saying, well, she's a WOMAN, and so she must have been a DIVERSITY HIRE. And she asked such a stupid question because WOMEN DON'T KNOW NOTHIN' ABOUT SPORTS.

Really? We're still dealing with this bullshite, all these years later?

Listen, women have been reporting on sports since before I started doing it, and that was a long damn time ago. Some of the smartest, funniest and toughest reporters I ever shared a pressbox with were women. And some of the dumbest, most clueless reporters I ever encountered were males -- mostly, because it was that kind of time, white males.

Yet here the lint-brains are, in 2024, using words like "diversity hire" to diminish the former. All while never using words like "white guy hire" to describe the sportswriters who asked dumb questions in the decades sportswriting was a white male bastion. Now, why is that, I wonder?

(Rhetorical question. We all know why that is.)

Look. I get it. "Diversity" has become the new bogeyman of the rabid right, because the rabid right always needs its bogeymen. It almost comically ignores American history, because no nation on earth has ever drawn so much of its character from the diversity of its people. That the usual creatures now cry sexism/racism because there's just too damn many women/people of color getting jobs only white males used to get is almost as comical.

They never say it that way, of course. But the sentiment sure seems clear.

White male oppression: It's what's for dinner these days at the Lint Brain residence.

And, yeah, I know, I've gotten well off track again. It happens. Tangents are kinda my thing. But in this case, it seems to me, the tangents are held together in a common weave.

And from where I'm sitting, it ain't a pretty one.