Strib misses the point on college sports

Breaking news from the Star Tribune editorial board:  college sports are hypocritical and corrupt.  And the concept of “one-and-dones” is transparently ridiculous.

But the fingers the Star Tribune points are, in large part, pointed in the wrong direction.  The real problem here is the National Basketball Association and its stupid rule that requires players to be at least 19 years old and one year removed from high school to enter the draft. The only purpose of the rule is to protect NBA owners and GMs from themselves.  Some of them just can’t tell the difference between Kevin Garnett and Kwame Brown.  And that just won’t do.  When the rule was changed to prohibit players from coming straight out of high school in 2005, the league tried to couch it as if this was their attempt to do something good for the college game.  Fortunately, that pretense has been dropped.

For our business purposes, the longer we can get to look at young men playing against first-rate competition, that’s a good thing, because draft picks are a very valuable thing. – NBA Commissioner David Stern

There’s no real reason that a guy like Kentucky’s Anthony Davis should have been playing in Monday night’s NCAA Championship game.  He was ready to play in the NBA this season, but was forced into the kabuki dance of going to college by this pointless rule.  And now Stern wants to make things worse:  by increasing the age limit to 20, he caps the earnings of players like Davis or Garnett (or Kobe Bryant or Dwight Howard or any other of the numerous straight-out-of-high-school success stories) for no real reason at all.  Not to mention that it forces colleges to continue this charade of trying to make big-time athletics seem as if academics are truly an important priority.

Fans here in Minnesota have seen the benefits of this rule being properly implemented.  Garnett was the franchise’s cornerstone from the day he was drafted, and the team now is building around Ricky Rubio, who has been playing professionally since the age of 14 and no one seems terribly offended by that.

Yes, some kids will make bad decisions.  Some may bring up the name of Ndudi Ebi, drafted by the Timberwolves in 2003.  Well, Ebi made $2.7 million in his three unproductive years here — more than enough to finance a college education.  (Not to mention the fact that Ebi has carved out a comfortable living playing in Europe in the years after his NBA career fizzled.)

We can help to lessen the hypocrisy and corruption in college sports by making sure that pro leagues aren’t passing the buck.  Talented kids should be able to make the leap directly from high school to the NBA.  Don’t like Kentucky and how they do things?  Don’t blame John Calipari — he’s just taking advantage of the mess that David Stern has made for college basketball.

Facepalm, New York Times edition

From Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times Public Editor (or “ombudsman” to those of us who aren’t East Coast elites), on his blog today:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

Seriously?  There’s only one reasonable response to such a ridiculous question.

 

Iowa Caucus: Don’t forget the media’s role in all of this

Lost in all the post-Iowa hubbub about who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out is the very real discussion of how the media has taken a confab of 120,000 largely white and rural voters and blown it up into an all-consuming every four years ritual that goes a long way in determining who the next President might be.  From Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Unfortunately, the “meaning” of the caucus results is not always clear. These rough edges are typically sanded away in post-Iowa reporting and commentary, however, which tends to emphasize the order of the finish (even when the margins between candidates are small) as well as unexpectedly weak or strong results. Media outlets then shift energy and resources toward candidates who performed well under the prevailing interpretation, while ignoring or providing negative coverage of those who were believed to have done poorly. These shifts in coverage, which themselves become part of the information party leaders are responding to, can help create massive post-Iowa swings in a candidate’s chances (PDF).

The result is a refraction effect in which journalists help make Iowa influential and then report on its “effects” without acknowledging their role in the process or the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions that are made among the candidates. This is a recurring problem—the norms of journalism demand that reporters exclude themselves from the stories they write, creating a troubling lack of self-consciousness about their own role in the process.

New York University’s Jay Rosen makes a similar point as well:

The Iowa Caucuses are presented as a news event, a mini-election with an informational outcome, a winner. But what they really are is a ritual, the gathering of a tribe, which affirms itself and its place in our political system by staging this thing every four years.

The need for the media to drive the narrative is extremely strong.  In 2012, it’s been just as much the media driving the boomlets for the many non-Romney contenders as it has been the fickle nature of the Republican voters.  After all, there’s 24-hour news channels to fill — someone has to be rising, someone has to be falling, someone has to be making a gaffe, someone needs to be daring to challenge the status quo and be admired for their spunk but consistently dismissed as a real threat.

Breaking down the Chanhassen Villager’s unbalanced political coverage

It’s been clear to readers of Southwest Newspapers for a while that the political coverage of the federal and state legislators in Carver County tends to have a bit of a lean to it. 

The coverage, which is led by the Chanhassen Villager team of Richard Crawford and Forrest Adams, frequently fails to challenge political spin offered by GOP elected officials and often omits or downplays Democratic perspectives.  A couple of stories from the March 31 edition indicate these trends perfectly.

Let’s start with “Budget proposals on the table“, written by Adams.

There’s attempts in here to include Democratic perspectives.  But these attempts are frequently out of context and/or lacking in comparable detail to the Republican perspective.  Looking at a few examples will make this more clear.

Democrats disagree. A public radio report quoted DFL legislators claiming the Republicans were using “Enron-style accounting” and basing their budget plans on unproven numbers. Gov. Dayton, speaking to several different audiences, referred to the majority plans as “draconian measures” and “in some cases barbaric.”

The problem with this quote is that no effort is given to explain what underlies these criticisms of the Republican plan.  The fact of the matter is that it’s true that Republicans have not agreed to use the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget numbers which have been used in the past and have instead relied on outside parties.  Additionally, the MN GOP hasn’t provided any of the underlying analysis behind these numbers.  By omitting this context, the comments are made to appear like garden-variety political griping when they are not — they are substantive critiques of the GOP majority’s actions.

And, there’s not a lick of discussion about the cuts that Republicans Julianne Ortman, Joe Hoppe, and Ernie Leidiger put their votes behind over the past couple of weeks.  Huge cuts to higher education and major cuts to health and human services, among them.  I would think most Villager readers would find these to be important to know about.

Here’s another example:

Democrats claim the LGA funding is likely to result in property tax increases that are at a much higher rate than would be offset by any refunds.

It’s not just Democrats saying this.  The Department of Revenue’s analysis of the omnibus tax bill shows this to be true (and, keep in mind that DoR is currently headed by a Pawlenty appointee). Yet, this analysis — released on Monday — doesn’t make it in to the story.  And, Ortman is allowed to state unchallenged that the bill will “greatly improve the livelihood of individuals receiving that tax relief”, when the evidence on this point is shaky at best.

Then, Adams slips these lines in later in the story:

DFL Sen. Tom Bakk, of Virginia, the former chair of the Senate Tax Committee, called Ortman’s tax bill “a big disappointment.”

No explanation of what is disappointing about the bill or why it is disappointing.

DFL Sen. John Marty at a news conference after the tax bill passed committee also decried the proposed $105 million cut to a renters’ property tax refund program.

Again, no explanation of why Democrats think this is important.  The fact that such changes actually make the bill regressive, not progressive, is missed in the Villager’s coverage.

The second story, Crawford’s “U.S. Census: Growth will bring new Senate district to county“, has a fundamental problem:  two GOP sources quoted, no DFL sources quoted.

Just because electoral results have gone predominantly in one direction in this area does not give the local media a pass to give lip service to other perspectives, ignore needed context and not apply some basic fact-checking to what elected officials say.

Our elected officials need to be held accountable, and it’s the media’s job to help with that process. And if they’re not doing their part of the job, it’s time to hold them accountable, too.