Press Coverage: Indignation, Gold Standard, Bad Dye Jobs and One Heck of a Weekend

It's interesting to see how the old adage that 'today's news is lining tomorrow's birdcages' works in the internet age. It's almost like we forget, as writers, that our words will stick around past the moment we write them. We often write in a vacuum, not knowing if the world around us will agree with our thoughts or universally reject them. Sometimes it’s a little of both.

So with that, I take the unenviable task of critiquing two writers I respect a great deal. Both Jeff Passan and Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! took to their keyboards to punch out varying degrees of indignation over the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. Passan led his column with "The Winter Olympics killed Nodar Kumaritashvili," taking the angle of bigger, faster and stronger – the mantra of all athletics, but specifically some of the Winter Olympic competitions trying to get attention on the sports landscape – caused this tragic event. Passan went so far as to say that those in charge of the sport committed 'negligent homicide' on the Olympian.

Actually, after the 'shock-you-to-the-core' lede, Passan's column is rather well reasoned, safe the descent into a meme we've all been caught using once or twice; going to the 'sport at its most basic' well – the old hunk of animal skin hurled at a man holding a stick description writers like SI's Jeff Pearlman seem to make a living going back to all the time.

The pursuit of something new will not end. Nothing dooms a sport like staleness. For three years, snowboarding stagnated with back-to-back 1080s as the ultimate trick. What more could the human body do than three consecutive turns with a slab of wood and fiberglass along for the ride?

While the quibbles with Passan's column may be nothing more than style, it was Wetzel who offered more substance to challenge. Wetzel was outraged that the investigation following Kumaritashvili's accident concluded that it was racer error, not the fault of the track. Wetzel asserted that the investigation, "purposefully asked the wrong question to assure the most-desired answer."

The indignation is dripping from Wetzel's piece. He's clearly in the moment on this one:

“There was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track,” the International Luge Federation and the Vancouver Olympic Committee said in a joint statement.

And that was the entire investigation. A couple of small adjustments and the luge is on for Saturday. No need to wait an extra second, let alone a day or two. No need to ask a few more questions or gather an outside opinion. The show must go on, no doubt to highest television ratings ever.

Posted at 4:30 AM on Saturday, Wetzel chided the Olympic officials for rushing back onto the ice, with "no need to wait an extra second, let alone a day or two" without mentioning the logjam it would cause at the track with all the different events that need to be run there. Now, he's right that's no excuse for a lack of compassion during a tragedy, but his column would seem a bit more balanced had the logistics of putting the event on hold been addressed. Besides, isn't it a bit ironic that Wetzel's incredulity was based on the fact that officials didn't take enough time – a 12-hour investigation wasn't enough in Wetzel's mind. He admonished them for 'small adjustments' when they actually made 'significant' adjustments before the event. They not only put up a wall and padding on the area that caused the terrible accident, but also lowered the starting point of the race to the women's starting point, thereby making the race shorter, and presumably slower in the process. Was that enough?

In Wetzel's column the next day, he quoted American Tony Benshoof who said, “[i]t’s significantly slower, significantly easier and significantly safer. Personally, I’d rather go from up top because that’s kind of my personality and my driving style. But I think, generally speaking, it was a good decision.” Other racers called the track "boring" now, but understood why it was done. Yet even in his follow-up story, Wetzel still managed to rip the organizers about six different ways.

Look, he's not wrong. Neither is Passan. And frankly, neither is the complete pabulum written by Bill Plaschke on the matter. (In fact, probably a columnist in every paper in the country wrote something like this, so it may not be fair to single out the national guys this much.) But yesterday's words don't line birdcages anymore; they're archived and cached on our browsers to go back and reference, and in this case, look at with a little bit of perspective. In fact, the guys at the Sports Pickle said it best:

In a stroke of good luck for you and your region, your local newspaper columnist is a renowned expert in a very narrow field: luge track architecture. His latest column ripped the design of the Whistler luge track at the Vancouver Olympics in the wake of the death of a competitor, calling it "an obvious accident waiting to happen" and demanding that the track designer be banned from the sport for several flaws in the layout, listing each in detail. The news comes as somewhat of a surprise considering earlier this week in his Olympic preview column he called luge "a fun, icy adventure I welcome re-discovering every four years."

The Gold Standard(s)
From ripping Yahoo writers to lauding them, comes this public service announcement. I read a lot of blogs, and have for quite some time. There has never, in my opinion, been better work on a sports blog than Dan Steinberg's coverage of the Olympics for the Washington Post. It's just far and away better than anything else out there, and it's an immense disservice to the reader that Steinz hasn't been in Vancouver.

What Steinberg did for blogging, J.E. Skeets, Tas Melas, Jason Doyle and Matt Osten have done for podcasting. The Basketball Jones has done incredible work over NBA All-Star weekend, two years in a row. The videos always deliver. Always. It truly is the gold standard of podcasts.

NBC Has Hired Everyone
Richard Sandomir had a report in the New York Times last week that gave a detailed breakdown of the coverage Canadian TV has for the Winter Olympics, including 12 different networks and 14 online video streams, as well as coverage in theatres nationwide. It is an impressive undertaking. And while the Canadian TV networks may be showing more of each event on their air than NBC, I can't imagine more announcers working for CTV-Rogers in Canada than NBC has for their coverage. It seems they've hired everyone.

NBC has a lineup of 53 different commentators, broadcasting more than 835 hours of coverage in Vancouver. And that, assuredly, doesn't include the NBC promotional machine, focusing nearly all of their MSNBC early-morning news coverage on Saturday to Olympic fluff pieces, including a story on where people watched the opening ceremonies. You'd expect that kind of stuff from the Today Show, but NBC has extended their coverage even further this time around.

Bob Costas runs the show, with Al Michales handling those duties during the day and on the weekends. Mary Carillo hosts the late-night coverage – no truth to the rumor that they'll be moving her to 10:00 PM – while serving as a correspondent around Vancouver. Cris Collinsworth also returned as a general correspondent, as did Dick Button. Lester Holt, Jimmy Roberts, Peter Alexander, Alex Flanagan and Dwight Stones will be handling the sports desk and newsy reporting stories.

There are a ton of names we recognize, including the whole cast of NBC's hockey coverage, including Mike Emrick, Joe Micheletti, Bill Patrick, Ed Olczyk, Mike Millbury, Pierre McGuire and Jeremy Roenick. Kenny Albert will also be calling games for NBC.

Dan Hicks handles the speed skating while Tom Hammond gets figure skating. Tim Ryan gets alpine skiing while Al Trautwig gets cross country. Bob Papa has the luge/bobsled/skeleton competitions while Matt Vasgersian takes on ski jumping, with each announcer getting a whole host of former Olympians like Scott Hamilton or Johnny Moseley and top-notch sideline reporters like Lewis Johnson and Andreas Kremer and Joyce. Unlike the NFL, the Olympics really do benefit from a sideline reporter, so their role is often vital to a telecast.

Also, 53 names on the NBC list and no mention of Matt Lauer or Tom Brokaw, who has gotten nearly as much face time in the first few days as Costas. Also, curiously absent from the release was Dan Patrick, who was seen on Sunday's coverage of the moguls doing his best winter-hat-and-puffy-vest-laden impersonation of a teenager trying to fit in at a ski resort. Maybe he was just trying to keep warm, but the look was a little too 'hep' for DP. That said, Patrick's attempt to look younger was nothing compared to Costas, who clearly couldn't have anticipated how terribly fake his hair color would look while doing sit-down interviews in high definition. Seven thousand people working for NBC during the Olympics and nobody to do QC on dye jobs? And isn't a Touch of Gray more dignified anyway? That's what I keep telling my wife, at least.

Who Said Anything About Hitler?
The first and only rule when invoking the name Hitler, or any reference to Nazi Germany, in sportswriting: you better make it funny. Mike Boone, writer for Habs Inside/Out, part of The Gazette in Canada, obviously forgot that rule.

There's not a franchise in sports I hate more than the Philadlphia Flyers.
Not the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Not the New York Yankees.
Not the Dallas Cowboys or L.A. Lakers.
No, you'd have to have an Olympic Games flashback to 1936 and watch the pride of Hitler's Germany marching into the Berlin stadium to match the feeling of revulsion I experience every time I see the Flyers play. Especially against the Canadiens.

Now, growing up both Jewish and a Flyers fan has me a little bit on edge about this, and I can feel the indignation brewing, which would obviously be a bit of irony with how this post began, so I'll let David Foley at Phinally Philly have the shot:

Comparing your hatred of maniacs who murdered millions of Jews to watching a hockey team play…classy! Now I get that Mr. Boone doesn’t appreciate our team’s physical style of play, but I’d take watching a hard-hitting team over a crappy under-performing clutch and grab group like the Canadiens any day. I’d also expect a bit more professionalism out of a guy writing for a actual newspaper’s sports blog.

Odds, Ends, NBC Tipping Medals
-- Was NBC tweeting out gold medals before they showed it on their air? They posted the winner of the men's moguls on Twitter more than 25 minutes before it aired on TV. It's a tough landscape for NBC to manage with trying to cover things live, yet needing to trim the fat of the athletes who aren't in contention to give a compelling telecast. Social media will always win every race, even to the detriment of their own product.

-- FOX made lemonade out of the Daytona 500 coverage during two lengthy breaks in the action to fix that pesky pothole on the track. With a lot of time to fill – I assumed they'd duck out and show an episode of King of Queens like they do during baseball rain delays – FOX did a very good job of interviewing drivers, showing recaps of the race and even doing an exhaustive breakdown of a NASCAR engine and drivetrain.

-- Technical difficulties with microphones and missed cues aside, the NBA on TNT crew proved why they have the best studio show in the business. The segmented interview with Mark Cuban, combined with the follow-up with commissioner David Stern was honest and informative. And Charles Barkley's point that the All-Star game is no time to talk about labor squabbles somehow added to the conversation, rather than undercut it.

-- Did USA Today really spell Dwyane Wade's name wrong? The headline writer's job is thankless.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.