#because they couldn’t just get like an entry level general reporter or like city beat position and instead just had to like post shit on

[easeupkid]

i was listening to a podcast the other day that kinda talked about how the pivot to video was like the plight of a lot of young journalists in the mid 2010s and i was thinking about it i’m going to say the plight of young journalists today is having to take jobs working as glorified social media managers

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: GM 76 - OTT - Not Happy

Do the Buffalo Sabres hate me? Monday night I’m here bearing my heart in a post following a loss defending this club like I believed they weren’t as bad as their results may be showing right now. Then that club goes and lays this egg. The worst team in the league, by standings and draft odds at least, just whopped the Buffalo Sabres 4-0. If it weren’t for all the comments from ownership then I don’t think I would be able to write a full post for you today. This crap… I couldn’t get through the highlights… this crap is unacceptable. But that’s the thing here isn’t it? How many nights have we said this is unacceptable? Barring the tank and Eichel’s rookie season there have been three straight seasons of total underachievement. We call it unacceptable, they call it unacceptable; it was all so unacceptable we chased Ryan O’Reilly out of town over it as if that would help! Three years of this unacceptability! We’ve gotten every kind of disappointment in that time. We got the season that started hopeful and ultimately didn’t move the team forward resulting in a player revolt and a coach’s firing. We got a season that was flaming trash from the start that only had the redeemable factor of winning a Draft lottery after it. Now we have the bait season in which we were all convinced this awful pattern had changed before we got yet another historic collapse! The Sabres can’t be bad next year purely because there can’t be any reruns! What is it going to take? Some of us think Terry and Kim don’t want to fire Housley because they don’t want to be paying another guy not to coach. CAN YOU BLAME THEM? Last offseason we accepted we need better players and it would seem, purely from a talent-on-the-roster perspective, that this season involves a better team. DOES IT? Is another coaching change going to help? It didn’t last time. I suppose you can get two bad ones in a row but dear lord, what is it?

Obviously we’re not doing a game recap today. The only thing from the game I want to revisit is that Anthony Duclair apparently plays for the Ottawa Senators now. I have a soft spot for that player from his New York Rangers days way back when. I hope you’re keeping your head up on that last place team, Anthony. That last place team that can beat the Sabres! Oh my God, what is it with this team!? They’re so bad that they make you question if the good things you see time to time are real or not. They’re so bad that season ticket holders who survived the 1980s Sabres are considering cancelling their tickets. They’re so bad that they got the Pegulas to speak again! I think I speak for every smart hockey fan when I say two things: general rule of thumb in this league is that its usually a bad thing if the owner is talking. The other thing is generally its better if they don’t interfere with the Front Office decision-making. The Pegulas are no Eugene Melnyk so I’m not sounding a five-alarm fire every time a beat reporter tweets a quote from them. However, I really think this mess belongs to Jason Botterill to fix. He’s worth keeping and if its under him he should be given the time to fix it. Terry Pegula said according to Paul Hamilton and Matthew Bove: “The season hasn’t finished yet, but I think Bots has said it pretty well that he supports Phil. Something has to change, but we don’t know what, we have to talk about it… He’s a young coach and was a great player and he can grow as a coach.” Before I get to what Kim said let’s just take this comment in acknowledgement of Botterill’s support for Housley a couple months back is a little concerning until you realize that Pegula wasn’t persuaded to fire Dan Bylsma and Tim Murray until after exit interviews. That said, we have a heavily involved ownership whether we like it or not and that ownership seems to be wanting stable leadership from behind the bench right now. Take that how you will but it was followed by pointing to the example of the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick. I don’t know if Housley is going to grow all that much as a coach but referencing his playing days doesn’t give me more confidence on that front. Moreover, I see no way he becomes Bill Belichick (and holy crap, maybe not the team you want to bring up in Buffalo, eh?). As Terry says though: Something has to change. Oh great, who are we chasing out of town this summer!? Let’s just rename this City Edmonton East well we’re at it.

Kim Pegula has some sway in this too and she made comments as well. She said: “Terry and I are not happy…” Oh good, join the club. I agree with that so much I am going to make it the title of this New Look Sabres. “…I’ve learned in sports to have more patience then I want to have. I don’t want to knee jerk anything. It’s been a long season, but we are not happy.” There is an argument to made for knee jerk reactions in this organization hurting progress. With all due respect a knee jerk reaction would have been firing Housley in January. Firing him in April would be long overdue, Kim. Lord knows these owners want to be involved in all the front office decisions but if they are really concerned about knee jerk reactions than maybe remove yourself from the fray. I can’t imagine this happening again with how the Ted Black Saga went at the beginning of their ownership but maybe it would be smart to put a President of Hockey Operations over Jason Botterill. I hate to reference the Toronto Maple Leafs but there is no better example of how having a President with a vision can make an organization function better. Funny enough, the Leafs lost to the Sens a few weeks ago too. That said, hiring a President of the Sabres also could do jack shit and it seems more likely that would be a symbolic move. Luckily Kim also had some fun stuff to report. On a day like this its nice to follow the pain with some candy. Kim Pegula stated that the Buffalo Sabres 50th Anniversary celebration will start at the NHL Draft in Vancouver. What that means we don’t know but it stands to reason it could mean that we’re getting Sabres Legends announcing picks and… dare I say it: Royal Blue back. Many folks with inside connections have said the organization is gearing up for a return to the classic color and fully original logo. The Winter Classic Jerseys last season and the Sabres Skills Competition jerseys this season were tests of this supposedly. I think a good 50th anniversary celebration is what we need right now.

Just like Kim Pegula dropping that information yesterday it felt like interesting timing when the organization announced Casey Fitzgerald was signed to his Entry-level contract and assigned to the Rochester Americans. This was officially announced before the game but good move either way timing-wise. Fitzgerald is a good right-handed defenseman who actually plays defense in addition to being a great two-way guy. He’s been tearing it up in College Hockey and if he is just as good with the Amerks during their playoff run then he will certainly get a very serious look come Training Camp in September. The current Sabres meanwhile take on Detroit on Thursday before another weekend back-to-back. It’s hard there is still six games left. Who wants that many at this point? I do, I guess since I’m going to the last game of the season in Detroit. Yeah, when I bought those tickets I thought a playoff spot would be clinched right now. I bought them a long time ago. Nonetheless, I’m cheering for more the idea of the Sabres than the team itself right now. What that means is that I’m cheering for and against other teams based upon past Sabres grudges, former Sabres and other fan-level beefs that make this phase of the season bearable. I am really looking forward to writing the Playoffs according to the Sabres to be honest. Before I wrap it up, you can expect the March Amerks Angle to be up tomorrow or Friday. Those guys are so exciting I imagine Will Borgen is eager to get back. Let’s Go Buffalo!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. There’s no way the lottery balls bounce in favor of the Sabres two years in a row, right? At this point our odds are only getting better unfortunately.

[avanneman]

Gregg Easterbrook watches the lying liberal media so you don’t have to

What is the deal with lying liberal media these days, those bad old legacy networks like CBS and NBC, filling the air with their bullshit lies? Deceit is the deal, and the Weekly Standard’s Gregg Easterbrook is on the case. Unfortunately, Gregg, in his role of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” tends to hide his epistemological light under a bushel basket full of bad boy blather regarding what’s up, and who’s down, in the NFL. Fortunately, I read Gregg so you don’t have to, and this last Tuesday ole Gregg went on a tear, tearing both CBS and NBC a new one, from which I will quote at length.

First up was the CBS shoot ‘em up Hawaii Five-0,1 which Gregg mercilessly indicts for its cartoonish carnage:

Five-0, a ratings hit, just reached its ninth season. In each season, individual episodes have shown more murders than occur in the actual state in a year. [35 in 2016, Gregg tells us] Five-0 has depicted machine-gun slaughters of surfer dudes and bikini babes on Waikiki beach; gigantic blasts leveling whole buildings in downtown Honolulu; bioengineered diseases causing evacuation of Hawaiian cities; death drones killing hikers and joggers on scenic Hawaiian hills; Honolulu bank robberies involving a dozen hoodlums firing military weapons; wildfires smothering Oahu; exploding tractor-trailer trucks in tourist areas; attacks by helicopter commandos on Hawaiian prisons; murders of the governor and other top public officials; and at least 100 police officers gunned down, significantly more than the total number of law enforcement officers who have died by gunfire in the entire history of the state.

But wait, Gregg’s just getting warmed up. He saves his real fire for Chicago P.D. I’ll quote from what he has to say at even greater length, since he touches on so many things that bother me about virtually all cop shows for the last 30 years—that, thanks to dramatic license/“magic”, we in the audience always know that the “perp” is not only “guilty” but guilty of the most “heinous” crimes, and not only guilty of the most heinous crimes, but a smug, arrogant smart ass as well, and thus all too deserving of getting his ass kicked sans any of this due process shit. What these shows are really about is revenge—we want to see awful people do awful things, and then have awful things done to them in return. Worst of all, as Gregg points out, on Chicago P.D. (which I’ve never seen) the awful people are black and their hapless victims are white.

Primetime American television, which is heavy on crime procedurals, is trebly wrong in its core depictions. First, violent crime is shown as out of control, when actually it is in a generation-long trend of decline. Second, affluent whites are depicted as primary targets of violent crime, when low-income minority group members are far more likely, as a population share, to be harmed. Third, law enforcement agencies are depicted as super-efficient avengers who always get their man, though, as the Washington Post reports, in the past decade, police in the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in about 50 percent of homicides.

Chicago P.D. takes these structural faults of primetime police procedurals and multiples them, pretending to be realism while relentlessly distorting practically everything about the city’s law enforcement.

,,,

Further troubling about Chicago P.D. is that the show lauds torture of suspects. Brutalized suspects always turn out to be guilty as sin, and the beatings always cause them to reveal information that saves an innocent life. Whether torture could be acceptable if law enforcement knew for sure an innocent life would be saved is a complex moral issue. In real-world policing, detectives rarely know if they have the right guy, while torture is, itself, a crime. Chicago P.D. manipulates audiences into rooting for torture, suggesting cops have godlike powers of knowledge and would never harm a suspect except if given no choice to protect the innocent.

Constitutional protections are laughed at on Chicago P.D. In this season’s premiere, the protagonist busts into the apartment of a dope dealer, threatens his girlfriend, and starts burning the dealer’s $100 bills to get the dealer to admit where the stash house is. The detective has probable cause, so why couldn’t the entry to the dealer’s apartment have been done legally? Because real heroes don’t waste time filling out forms for some namby-pamby warrant!

Chicago P.D. suggests to the NBC primetime audience that crime could end tomorrow if bleeding-heart politicians didn’t tie the hands of heroic cops who inexplicably know exactly where every offender is at every moment and never, ever mistreat the innocent. I wonder if Dick Wolf would want to live in a neighborhood where cops are free to smash down his door and rough him up because only a wimp would go to a judge for a search warrant.

Most disturbing is that Chicago PD depicts police officers as the real victims of urban dysfunction.

In one episode, a foot patrolman chases a murder suspect while loudly yelling “Stop! Police!” After the suspect raises a gun and the patrolman shoots him, the officer is immediately fired, then prosecuted. In another episode, a policewoman observes a murder and shoots the killer while trying to apprehend him; she is fired immediately, without any investigation or union rights. In both episodes, mobs of angry African Americans form outside the precinct house—causing the viewer to perceive police officers as the ones in danger, and blacks as the real threat.

At the end of last season, a decorated detective—shown to viewers as dedicated to protecting the innocent—is sent to prison on a trumped-up charge in order to appease the media and a sinister African-American higher-up. Though the detective’s record is clean, the judge denies bail. As soon as the noble officer is behind bars, he’s stabbed to death by the drug gang that runs the jail.

Why would a judge deny bail to an officer with no prior conviction? “I got a call from the mayor,” the judge explains to the show’s hero. The media and the minority group mobs, it is implied, like to hear that white Chicago cops are being killed.

Maybe there are cities in which mayors telephone judges with instructions, though this is really not how the criminal justice system is supposed to function. But that’s how the criminal justice system is presented to NBC’s primetime audience, in a show that bills itself as the hidden truth about Chicago law.

Yes, we are living in Trump’s America. NBC tells us so.

Afterwords Yes, I am quoting an awful lot of Gregg’s piece, but I don’t see why readers have to wade through 50 column inches of “funny” jokes about wide receivers to find this excellent journalism.

The one thing I would add to this piece, which Gregg actually touches on in his discussion of Hawaii Five-0, is the grotesque overemphasis on terrorism as a threat on these shows. Since 9/11, all of the major terrorist events in the U.S. have been the result of a few individuals, either citizens or long-time residents, acting without assistance from international terrorist groups. We have had no incidents involving "weapons of mass destrution" of any kind, and, as I've said before, those weapons, while terrifying, are not, in fact, "weapons of mass destrution", being no more (and no less) effective than old-fashioned explosives and considerably less reliable.

Typographical trivia, anyone? “Hawaii Five-0” supposedly means “Hawaii 50”, since Hawaii is the fiftieth state. But (I guess) “Hawaii Five Oh” is easier to say than “Hawaii 50”. But CBS “spells” the title with a “0” (zero) rather than an “O” (capital letter). “Everyone” still pronounces “0” as “O” (again, I’m guessing), even though computers have made the distinction significant for almost forty years now. ↩︎