"Say What You Will About the Tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at Least it's an Ethos"

You thought we were tough on Brian Morelli's Carl-Monday-esque look at Facebook. From last Wednesday's Press-Citizen letters to the editor:

The article on football players' facebook pages was interesting ("Alcohol abundant on players' sites," Aug. 23), in its association of disgusting misogyny with alcohol abuse, and in how it provided a springboard to change the subject midstream, and hype the 21-ordinance. Hopefully it's coincidental that it seemed such a masterful use of the propaganda tactic of demonization by association, in tying such vile comments to underage drinking.

Iowa City is above such tactics, even if its media isn't. Propagandists like Joseph Goebbels would approve, but it doesn't address the issues, and is quite divisive.

See how it works? I associated you with the Nazi propagandist, just because you used a Nazi tactic. It's similarly unfair to associate underage drinkers with misogyny. Alcohol may bring vile behavior into play, but only in vile people. The vast majority doesn't exhibit such behavior. Your Neo-Prohibitionist friends resort to such tactics, but you'd be wise to refrain.

Some friendly advice: Knock it off. You may not be better than this, but we are.

We may have been mean to Morelli. We may have exposed the hypocrisy in his own Facebook profile. We may have even let our readers advocate spamming him back into the stone age. But you have to hand it to us: We didn't call him a Nazi.

(Props to 'Cuse blogger Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician, who is obviously reading our local papers more closely than me.)

Cue the obligatory overreactions about Facebook

This is going to come as a shock to nobody, but the bottom-feeders at the Press-Citizen have discovered that many football players use facebook, and they are shocked--SHOCKED!!--to find out that the football players behave like, well, typical 18-22 year-olds.

The Facebook pages of more than 20 underaged University of Iowa football players have photos appearing to show them engaging alcohol in various ways, from drinking to posing with liquor bottles or beer cans.

In addition, several UI football players have messages attached to their profiles that discuss alcohol consumption, racial slurs and other offensive subjects.

OH MY GODDAMN GOD BEER CANS CANCEL THE SEASON!

The rest of the article is similarly stupid, and presented with an O'Reilly-esque disregard for irony. The reporter, Brian Morelli, seems content to play the "I'm just telling our readers what's out there" card, except for one key portion of the article:

The Press-Citizen e-mailed [associate athletics director Fred Mims] several of the additional images it found during its review of players' Facebook sites, and Mims did not immediately return calls for comment.

Fuck you, dude. It's one thing to "report," but this business of trying to bust the players yourself is cheap bullshit.

Oh, in case you folks are curious, the reporter (Brian Morelli) is also on facebook... and is also dumb enough to make his profile public to the UI community. And this just in: Brian Morelli is lame as fuck. Some "highlights":

Activities: press-citizen
Interests: writing; juggling; biking; hiking; cooking; hanging out with my fam; people watching; pissing into my own mouth

[If you want to be a stickler, I made that last one up. -OPS]

He's also got some pictures of his kids, which he may have purchased on the black market. Even more disturbing, though, is one picture where the reporter is present:

Look at all that alcohol! You've got kids, Morelli, and you're throwing it all away!

We expect his indefinite suspension by 8 a.m. Monday morning.

Happy Monday, folks

We spent the weekend working on a shocking expose of Illinois head coach Ron Zook. We'll be bringing that to you throughout the week, depending on how quickly our lawyers tell us we can print certain parts.

Past that, the Harty Party wants you to not talk about certain things anymore, days after it's all his paper talked about. Thanks Pat, you lovable syrup-covered hack.

The QC Times, of course, opted to run a real article instead, this one a great profile on redshirt freshman Julian Vandervelde, a 6'3", 295 pound teddy bear.

There is a reason Vandervelde is the way he is — why he didn’t hesitate before standing up and singing Phantom of the Opera’s “All I Ask of You” in front of teammates and their families and Texas players and their families at a talent show leading up to the Alamo Bowl last December, why he felt totally comfortable offering his rendition of the National Anthem to thousands of rallying democrats at a Hillary Clinton campaign stop this summer in Iowa City.

BO-RING! Wake me up when he's a champion yodeler. The Stars 'n Bars are so played out these days; I'll be impressed when someone walks up to a microphone and belts out the theme from the Price is Right's Cliff Hangers game.

He garnered all-state honors as a member of the debate team, excelled in forensics, authored award-winning poems and short stories, was the lead in the school play and continued to sing in the choir and play in the band — all while maintaining a 3.75 grade-point average.

Still not a fucking yodeler.

The article contains an unusual amount of trepidation when it comes to his actual playing ability--a strange sight indeed, when you're doing a puff piece during the summer. It even contains the cryptic threat of "don't call him a football player." Eric, don't pull a Nancy Clark on us. The guy's on scholarship for football, not poetry. He's penciled in as the starting left guard. He's a football player. He's not only a football player, but who's going to make that argument in the first place?

You don't have to hack your way through a profile, Eric. Don't bring yourself down to the level of every other sportswriter in the entire state.

That's the least of what you are.

Being a reporter doesn't mean tossing your critical thinking skills out the window

Two articles available today about the Big Ten network: One is from the Press-Citizen's Ryan Suchomel, with the unfortunate title of "BTN set to tackle airwaves." It starts off with this wholly unbiased gem:

The Big Ten Network plans to provide fans with all the Big Ten football news they could ever want.

Wow! Neato! The rest of the article is just quotes from a few of the on-air guys, preceded by Suchomel saying what they said, but with different words.

Griffith, a former Illinois player, said Big Ten fans are going to love what they find on the BTN.

"They are going to see stories and features they weren't able to see," Griffith said. "This network has to appeal to the Big Ten fan. They are passionate about all of the games. I'm excited to be a part of it."

Sigh. I mean, what can you say about an article like this? Is it intellectually dishonest? Depends on if Suchomel believes all this shit. Is it lazy reporting? Absolutely. Is it typical of a Gannett paper to toe the "fuck the consumers" line? That's a question for another day (short answer: yes).

Steve Batterson at the QC Times (quickly becoming the paper of record for Hawkeye information), meanwhile, should probably send a thank you card to the sports desk at the PC, because they're making him look awfully good just for pointing out the stunningly obvious: this network is going to take a lot of your money.

Three words of advice when it comes to talking about the current spat between the Big Ten Network and Mediacom – watch your wallet.

As the opening paragraph of a story I wrote more than a year ago when plans for the network were announced, watching Big Ten games in the future will come with a price.

That will not change, no matter how the current impasse between the network and major cable players throughout the region plays out.

From a strict "for the conference and its members" standpoint, this is a noble undertaking. The network is expecting to pour about $7 million a year of revenue into the coffers of each member of the Big 10. How they expect to do that while trying to mean-mug the cable companies into caving in, of course, remains to be seen.

From the cable operators' standpoint... well, good luck trying to get in their mindset. While Mediacom's tussle with Sinclair a few months ago was well-understood, the ESPNU one wasn't. Oh well. As long as cable refuses to allow a la carte channel selection, they'll be a bunch of greedy bastards. Seriously, why charge us for channels we're never going to watch? I imagine plenty of Americans would have a cable lineup similar to mine: Basic channels, Discovery, the ESPN family, TNT, Comedy Central, and Soap Net (don't judge me!). Yet I digress.

Last, the questions remain for the fans: Do you really want to have to pay dozens of dollars a year for shit that's only interesting when it's your own team? How is the channel's programming during the summer months not going to be totally unwatchable? Isn't a march to only subscribe to the channel for 4 months a year pretty much inevitable? Last, if revenue's going to be spread equally, then of that money you're dropping for the network (and its inevitable surrounding tier of channels), lots won't even see the Big 10, then the conference will take its skim, then only 1/11 of it goes to your favorite school. You going to be okay with that while Penn State and Wisconsin duke it out in male field hockey this summer?

If you haven't been to HawkMania.com recently, you ought to

The state of Iowa, while a good source of writers, is far from an attractive destination. It is, no doubt, frustrating for parents to try to encourage their young children to read the newspaper, only to find out that their easily impressionable minds are subjected to hacks like Nancy Clark and Pat Harty (or even worse, us).

Child: "Daddy, daddy! I read the newspaper like you told me to, and I learned from Nancy Clark that the Hawkeyes start white receivers because Kirk Ferentz is racist!"
Father: "There is no hope for this world." (commits suicide)

That's why it's been refreshing to read Eric Page's comprehensive coverage of the Hawkeyes from the Big 10 media conference for the QC Sun-Times. His July 31 article on Jake Christensen, while drenched in unnecessary second-person perspective ("Curious now, you moved a little bit closer." is just creepy), is nonetheless the clear-cut best player profile to be written this season. Then there's the thankless task of providing analysis of an online poll that only about 200 people bothered voting in:

With Christensen, it’s obvious — as the quarterback goes, the team goes, right? But the guy is a first-year starter, and first-year starters — especially at quarterback — take time to develop in the Big Ten. So I can see a scenario where Christensen doesn’t have that great of a year, but Iowa still is able to have success. If the offensive line can gel and the running game can dominate and if the defense can shut down opponents and create turnovers, all the quarterback is going to have to do is not make mistakes, which wouldn’t necessarily make him a huge impact guy.

Sounds logical enough, right? Okay, but where has anything as sane as that been anywhere else in the state? Let's take a look at some gems from the DM Register's Sean Keeler and the ICPC's Pat Harty.

Harty's last article was about listening to Bryan Mattison. Naturally, the first quote doesn't come until 10 grafs in--and it's from linebacker Mike Klinkenborg. Even in that instance, though, the notion that Harty is a blithering retard is merely implicit. Never one for subtlety, though, Harty removes all doubt later in the same article:

Bryan also became agitated when I told him that some fans have asked me whether Ferentz has lost some of the magic that helped him rebuild the football program.

"I wouldn't even answer that question if I was you," Bryan said. "Coach Ferentz is one of the best coaches in the nation.

"If I knew what a magic touch was, I don't think he's lost it. Those people that ask that question don't know anything about football."

Good move, Harty. Ask a classy player to toss his coach under the team bus. The worst part is that Harty fucking enjoys doing that. He worded his question quite purposefully and carefully, characterizing the skeptics as "some fans," when a much more accurate description would be "some fans named Pat Harty." If he thought it was a terrible, baseless question, he wouldn't have asked it. He can explain it away with the notion that he's just "stirring the pot," but that's just a nice euphemism for "being a little shit."

Then there's Keeler, cramming football metaphors into a cable story with all the grace and nuance of a 32-DD breast enhancement surgery. From the story titled "Big Ten Network Needs To Punt":

Delany, the Big Ten’s commissioner, downplayed media concerns Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, declaring that negotiations between the Big Ten Network and major cable providers were simply “at halftime.”

Actually, there’s 6 minutes left in the fourth quarter, he’s down about three touchdowns, and the clock is ticking. If somebody doesn’t throw a Hail Mary, Iowa fans are going to be left in the dark.

So they have to punt, then throw a Hail Mary, then they'll be down by 14 late in the fourth quarter? What does that even mean?

At the very least, we've got Marc Morehouse up at the Gazette giving us what we really need to read over coffee and eggs:

However, a locker room sprint at the end of the first half against Ohio State in mid-September was more alarming to Paterno's ego.

"I didn't get sick. I got diarrhea,'' the 80-year-old Paterno said.

God bless you, Morehouse. You've put me in a good enough mood to spare everyone the Pat Harty Avalanche.

Here's a puppy instead. You're all so lucky.