I've been steamed about a column by a journalistic moron named George Vecsey of the New York Times (pictured) critiqued in a blog out of Knoxville called View from the Cumberlands that, in effect, calls this lazy, uninformed, arrogant bigot out.Many of you know about the recent accusation of a recruiting violation at the University of Tennessee that involves some of what everyone is terming "hostesses," visiting football players at a high school game in South Carolina. That would be a violation of NCAA rules if the UT ladies were sent by the coaching staff to the game to recruit two players (who had already committed to Tennessee, making that act unnecessary; one has since changed his commitment, blaming it on this negative publicity). At worst, this is what the NCAA calls a "secondary violation," not in the same league, say, as LSU paying a player to come to school, which has been alleged and which has not been covered by NYTimes columnist George Vecsey.
Vecsey is all over the UT "scandal," as he terms it, primarily because it sounds promisingly salacious. Any columnist worth his ink in NYCity would fall all over his keyboard getting at this thing: hot young honeys; younger, supple athletes who are black; potential race mixing in the South; a prep coach in Memphis telling the NYTimes that the girls rubbed their boobs on him and some of his players visiting UT (but refusing to testify to that effect to the NCAA); big-time football; Southern accents and all those hayseeds speaking with those same accents. A Yankee newspaperman too lazy to do his homework and too steeped in redneck, inbred stereotypes could have a blast with this one. He seems to have done that.
Problem with Vecsey's column is that it's mostly wrong, mostly bigoted, mostly shows his uninformed ass to the rest of the world and tells us by example that the newspaper business has lost far, far too many good reporters and that the end is a lot closer than we originally thought for said newspaper business. When the Gray Lady becomes a Red Madam, it's time to close the curtains.
What galls me more than anything else about Vecsey's column is that this boob is writing it in what has been a respected publication. It's like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk having air time when what they say is stupid, harmful and represents the base impulses of the worst of us. It oozes with a level of bigotry, propoganda and arrogance that is nauseating. We in this region continue to be stereotypes to people like Vecsey and I damn well don't like it a bit. We've cut jerks like him slack long enough. It's time now to do the very worst thing we can do to him: stop reading his crap.
Here's the Cumberlands piece (because its writer is witty, informed and as mad as I am), but I'm not linking to the NYTimes jerk. He doesn't deserve it.
Rush Limbaugh is a humorist with an explicitly expressed political slant whereas this so called "boob" as you put it is a supposed journalist. Seems like a big difference and one which makes your analogous use of Limbaugh less useful other than to titilate a liberal reader with an easy straw man. You can do better than that.
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ReplyDeleteI rather enjoyed George Vecsey's column. I thought he did a pretty nice job of making something of nothing. But I do wonder how those two 'hostesses' decided to go to the game, and how they got there.
ReplyDeleteTempest in a teapot. Fodder for SEC opponents. Stupid move by UT.
Kurt: The hostess program is not part of the athletic department and probably was not directed from within. In any case, it really and truly is, as you said, a tempest in a teapot if it even reaches that level of relevance.
ReplyDeleteJim: Rush Limbaugh is an overfed, overpaid, loudmouth bigot who calls himself an "entertainer" when that's convenient and a "hard-hitting journalist" when he thinks that works. He is never right about anything, but that aside, it's his tone, his manner and his abusiveness of good Americans that burns up most of us on both the right and the left. There are equivalents on the left and I detest them, too. There is no room in a civilized society for his racism, his abuses of anybody who disagrees with him and with his anti-American attitudes. But, hey, my guess is that he appreciates "hostesses" in the traditional sense.
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