Famous Newspeople Who Are Really Bad at Their Jobs

That's raycess.

 

She makes some valid points about the value of HBCUs, but in the end doesn't this make her a segregationist?

 

I'll bet if the black athletes wanted to bring along a couple of their pigment-challenged brethren (albeit only the really good white athletes), she would be fine with it.

 

Then how about making every journalism student in the country listen to old Bob Edwards tapes. I don't remember him asking leading questions and they were sure concise. And I actually am serious.

 

People have asked me what I thought about that Jemele Hill piece.

I haven't seen her at a Florida Classic for quite the while now.

 

I'd say that's exactly what it makes her.

 

I get really tired of people asking other people to make sacrifices they were unwilling to make themselves. And lets be real - even if the best players went to HCBUs, they still wouldn't get a sniff of a college football playoff with an undefeated season. It's about the name on the front, not the back in college. I've seen enough bad football in the past week to realize fans aren't watching for quality, but for loyalty.

 

They wouldn't get a sniff of the College Football Playoff just like any other FCS school. There are no FBS HBCUs.

 

I get that. Maybe it was just the trend in the mid-aughts, what with the distaste for the Iraq War and the Bush era, but j-schoolers and non-j-schoolers alike were pining for a rabid truth-teller in the mold of HST, not so much Tom Wolfe. Wolfe seemed to play with stretching the truth, whereas HST was exacting and vengeful with that tool.

He was a hell of a writer and storyteller, and I have read damn near the entirety of his published works, but the ethos — his ethos — of “now let me tell you the REAL truth” underlies our worst failings in this profession.

 

Janet Cooke made up a story and won a Pulitzer - a complete fabrication from whole cloth.
Fake News before a pumpkin-headed dipshit began braying it every day.

 

Where does Geraldo Rivera fit in this conversation?

Mitch Albom is really good at promoting Mitch Albom. But anybody but Mitch Albom would have been fired on the spot for making up quotes.

AP category: Doug Ferguson. (Not bad, but getting a Tiger mention in stories that have nothing to do with Tiger is incredibly tiresome.)

I'm trying to find an example of a nationally-known radio "newsperson" -- Limbaugh doesn't count -- who was bad. If you made it to CBS, Mutual or ABC in their heydays, you were pretty damn good.

 

I think that radio newsmen were generally good at their jobs. In part because it was not a visual medium and people tended to get hired for their skills.

I do think that many television sideline reporters are bad at their jobs. They frequently ask rambling, incoherent questions and rarely can ask a decent follow-up. I think this is due to the fact that they are gifted on-air presenters hired to ask questions. The skills to be a good presentor are different than the skills to be a good interviewer.

And I don't classify sports talk radio guys as "newspeople" but when they interview they frequently ask such leading questions that they circle their guest into agreeing with the host's opinion.