Costas, Whitlock, and the Olbermann-ization of sports journalism

Costas, Whitlock, and the Olbermann-ization of sports journalism

Amy Lutz had a great column yesterday about the liberal politicization of the Jovan Blecher murder-suicide.  It’s tragic.  Blecher, who played for the Kansas City Chiefs, fatally shot his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. Liberals, however, are salivating. It didn’t take long for Fox Sports correspondent Jason Whitlock to offer his opinion about guns in America.

Lutz wrote:

“I grew up in Kansas City as a Chiefs fan, so I’m familiar with Whitlock’s work. I used to glance at his columns  after my father finished with the sports page in the Kansas City Star. Early on, his articles were focused solely on Kansas City sports. Then, as he expanded his focus, Whitlock dabbled in political punditry. That’s when I lost interest for his clear liberal bias began to show. I don’t know when a sports column became the proper venue to state one’s political opinions, but I didn’t read long to find out. It wasn’t long after Whitlock became political that my family decided the Kansas City Star was the Midwest’s Pravda and we discontinued our subscription.”

Well, when Whitlock compared the NRA to the KKK with CNN’s Roland Martin on December 3 – I would’ve ended my subscription too.

“SCOTT WHITLOCK: I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture — I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].”

Lutz concluded her piece by saying how:

NBC’s Bob Costas referenced Whitlock’s column during the Sunday Night Football broadcast and went into his own gun control rant. He stated that tragedies like this give us the opportunity to “put things in perspective.” For him, that “perspective” is gun control.

[…]

It’s not Whitlock and Costas’ opinions that offend me. It’s the fact that they exploited a tragedy to bring light to their own agendas. Can we please let the families grieve before we decide to politicize what they are going through? Can we turn to prayer instead of politics? In this world, perhaps not anymore. All too often, liberal commentators take gun violence as an opportunity to blame an inanimate object for a human decision. It’s all indicative of the decline of personal responsibility in this nation. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise to me anymore, but I’m still offended. Using someone’s murder to talk about your personal opinion isn’t just wrong, it’s downright selfish and disrespectful.

However, we are dealing with, and I’m sure Amy would agree, a core-less group of people who lust for such events to advance their political agenda.  Sadly, the gun control crowd must have missed the 2000 election where the debate was virtually settled, and conservatives emerged victorious.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that this foray into the gun control debate is just another liberal ploy to consolidate the women’s vote.  Women tend to be more sympathetic to curbing our Second Amendment freedoms, thus another slicing of the electorate before the 2014 elections has possibly begun.

I think conservatives should pray for the families of Belcher and his girlfriend to show that we aren’t going to dabble in this sort of depraved behavior to score political points.  I’m not worried about the fallout from these two clowns’ commentary on guns.  The American people are dead-set against tougher gun laws, but that doesn’t mean we slack off when it comes to anti-gun representatives in Washington.

In the meantime, Bob Costas said that his 90 second commentary during halftime last Sunday night was a “mistake.”

 “My mistake is I left it open for too much miscommunication,” Costas said in a lengthy interview on “The Dan Patrick Show. The 90-second weekly spot, he said, doesn’t offer enough time in which to adequately discuss the issue of “the football culture, the gun culture, domestic violence.”

Then, why did you open your mouth, Bob?  This isn’t ABC’s This Week. It’s Sunday Night Football.  The Olbermann-ization of sports is becoming rather absurd, and tragically idiotic. Costas’ worst part of his lecture was his insufferable knowingness that “if Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins [Belcher’s girlfriend] would both be alive today.”  Well, that’s pure drivel.

Despite the fact that most violence from domestic disturbances comes from someone’s hands, what if Belcher didn’t have a gun.  Belcher would have beaten her, stabbed her, or suffocated her to death.  Humans possess a rather macabre sense in how to eliminate one another  Yet, that’s ok – because a gun isn’t involved in any of those egregious scenarios.  It’s not exciting enough to put to print.  That’s liberal logic.

Not only should we avoid politicizing these horrible events, sports journalists steer away from the political iceberg, which sunk Keith Olbermann’s career.  So, Costas and Whitlock, who are temporarily BFFs, let’s take a chill pill on the gun rhetoric.  It just makes you look like the John Madden of politics.

 

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