Trust in the media is rapidly eroding, and a lot of it is the media’s own fault.
In his latest column at The Players’ Tribune, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman — a whipsmart communications grad from Stanford and a Christian — talks about his offseason (mostly chasing two little kids around and baby-proofing his house) and how his relationship with team QB (and fellow Christian) Russell Wilson has been portrayed, rightly and often wrongly, in the press.
Even in preseason practice, head coach Pete Carroll expects the team to give 100 percent, and Sherman is no exception.
Here’s a taste:
So you could take that moment when I picked Russell off and chirped back at him, and you could take it out of context and say, “Oh, there must be discord in Seattle.”
Or … you could recognize it as a competitive moment.
Iron sharpens iron. One person sharpens another. And the corners on Sundays aren’t going to go easy on Russell. So why would I go easy on him during the week? That’s not helping him prepare for Sunday. That’s not making him better. And I know that there’s nothing he’s going to face on Sunday that he will not have already seen in practice, because we practice how we play. We compete. So no matter what happens in the game, he’ll know how to respond.
And that day at practice? After I made that pick? He did respond. He turned it up a notch. The whole team did. And after practice, it was all love. All handshakes and, “Good practice, bro.” All the way around.
That’s how we practiced all season.
And it helped get us back to the Super Bowl.
That’s the thing: You can take a snapshot of a competitive moment — any moment, really — and build an entire narrative around it. You can build a narrative of competition and unity, or discord and division. And the media today has gone Hollywood. They put the movie magic into their stories to make them more dramatic. So they want discord over competition, and division over unity, because … clicks. And sometimes, they’re creating a story that isn’t there.
Reporters sometimes act as if they believe that people in other professions should behave better than they probably do in the newsroom or their own lives. They often spend inordinate amounts of time trying to read tea leaves rather than just looking at what’s happening in front of them.
Some people hint and send signals; other people just say and do. Some telegraph a warning; others hit as if from nowhere (hint: it’s never from nowhere; you just don’t know from where). If you don’t take the time to learn which people are which, you’re going to get a whole lot wrong.
Or, you just obstinately refuse to take anyone in context, because that would upend a juicy narrative.
Sometimes a CB yelling at a QB at practice means something, if the CB is the sort of guy who never yells at anyone, or he and the QB have a serious personal problem, or the QB is touchy and sensitive.
Other times it means absolutely nothing.
As Sherman says, “Sometimes, family members fight.”
As do we all.
But, I don’t want to speak for Sherman. Click here to read the whole thing, and he’ll tell you exactly what he thinks — because he’s that kind of guy.
Images: Wikimedia Commons; Getty Images (Embed)
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