Don’t rely on media to evaluate bad behavior
By Phil Mushnick
Last Updated: 6:02 AM, May 4, 2012,
Posted: 12:52 AM, May 4, 2012
http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/knicks/double_standard_TFPqqilUHif01I9BKkQSkN
Could there possibly be a better and more delicious headline for an American newspaper column in the year 2012 than the one in this now controversial Phil Mushnick column? No!
It's pitch perfect.
Were that it was one plastered on the New York Times editorial page, esp. if it was the title above a remorseful column about why their own reporters can't seem to harness their own bias in reporting on news stories, despite constant complaints from readers and editors about it, yet constantly want to write about the horse race aspects of elections large and small, instead of exploring issues, as readers have overwhelmingly stated in poll after poll when they're actually asked what THEY want to see more of.
Meanwhile, Beltway reporters continue to ignore that fact and treat it like all the other inconvenient facts they choose to ignore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
To say that it was entirely predictable that all four assembled "writers" -and that's being VERY generous in describing what they actually do- had a problem with what Phil Mushnick wrote in his NY Post column is an understatement.
To say that they seemed strangely ignorant of the larger point he was making in exposing the rapper's rank hypocrisy in pretending he and his team don't know anything at all about what black & white logos have come to be associated with, goes without saying.
Yes, it's almost as if they had never seen or read any of the dozens and dozens of news accounts of the crime angle re gangs and sports logos, ones that even non-sportwriter you have already heard about many times, and that I recount thru the upcoming links for those who somehow haven't, perhaps because they live overseas.
(Sort of like their collective ignorance of having nearly six-month old video, from November 16th, queued up as the most recent video of their show on their ESPN website.)
The assembled writers showed much the same sort of dumbfounded look that many visitors have shown me in this town the past few years when they'd drive-up at night to Hallandale Beach City Hall, just off of U.S.-1, because they just naturally assumed the low-slung building with the very dark parking lot was actually a hotel, because there was no sign identifying it otherwise. (Until a month ago.)
I know this because I have twice been the person stopped in the parking lot on my way to my car after a HB City Commission meeting, and asked where the "hotel office" was.
So what's the part you don't get?
Read this from the North Carolina Gang Investigators Association and take an aspirin:
http://www.ncgangcops.org/archives/Team%20Logos.pdf
You're welcome.
Starving for self-esteem?
In 2008, in Season 4, Episode 7 of TNT's The Closer, in an episode titled "Sudden Death," the younger brother of Det. Julio Sanchez is killed on the sidewalk near his home while his older brother is off-duty, busy working on his car in the driveway.
We quickly learn that the younger brother had been killed while talking to a girl for the simple crime of wearing a ball cap with colors of a rival gang.
A ball cap given to him by his older brother for his birthday, to Det. Sanchez's everlasting sorrow.
Video of Brenda's interrogation at: http://youtu.be/rK_lVXoh84k
This is by far one of the best episodes of this great TNT series I never miss, whose final six episodes air this summer, starting July 6th.
But this sort of fictional treatment of countless real episodes apparently doesn't compute in the minds of the apologists for the rapper-turned-sports owner.
They don't want to acknowledge what we already know.
I guess it just hurts their feelings that they're on the wrong side of the slippery slope, but then given how much sycophantic coverage this rapper gets from the mainstream media, it's not so surprising.
Yes, it's not your imagination, you really haven't seen anything on Entertainment Tonight about the conscious decision by him and his team to use that color scheme because ET wants to remain a "talent-friendly" venue for celebs, the publicist's friend, not one where actual public criticism of entertainers is ever given, unless it's of one celeb against another, in which case it's golden.
After all, if they did ever entertain the thought of actually asking him to explain why they made that choice, then the more-mainstream Beyonce wouldn't be available to them, so they just keep their blinders on so they don't have that become a possibility.
Which, of course, is why Phil was correct in saying, "I plan to continue to argue against the negative racial and ethnic stereotyping and the promotion of mindless violence, especially to the young and most vulnerable.”
I remember over twenty years ago when I first had to explain the reality of this phenomena of criminal gangs and sports logos to my mother while I was down here one year from D.C. for the Christmas holidays, before the Marlins ever existed.
incongruous.
When I began explaining it to her, she actually thought I was exaggerating, despite how many examples I could give her, esp. via the gang use of the Georgetown Hoyas' "G" in places very far from D.C., like Chicago.
They call him Mr. Pitts.
That election was very much a great surprise to them I hardly need mention, given their continuing myopia and rose-colored glasses about the reality around them.
The question they and the rest of the Sunshine State's MSM never actually deigns to ask.
If they had to do it all over again, if they knew there was a good chance that someone they were menacing would fire first and ask questions later, what would they do?Well, Grimm and Pitts don't visit and don't ask that question for obvious reasons.
Nothing.
Chicago Crime Commission's 2012 Gang Book: