The Charlotte Observer ran a feature article about college football prospect, Robert Quinn today. To the side of the conclusion of the article on page 3C the Observer listed their Top 50 recruits in North Carolina and South Carolina. Why would I be surprised that they listed RJ Mattes as uncommitted with seven potential schools when Mattes publicly committed to NC State eight days ago and has called every coach recruiting him and asked them to stop their recruitment?
Any time that we criticize the media we invariably receive a snide remark from someone who doesn’t understand our point and incorrectly assumes that we are accusing the media of a ‘conspiracy’ (despite the fact that we never mention the word ‘conspiracy’). You can click here for our most recent media-based discussions that is one of the five most popular stories on the blog this month.
Let me help those of you that don’t get it - outlets like the Charlotte Observer are not a part of some ‘conspiracy’ to get NC State. Outlets like the Charlotte Observer are just not very good at what they do. It is called incompetence, not a conspiracy. Add to that a blatant longstanding and uncontestable bias towards certain schools and you have a recipe for that incompetence to manifest itself more
Here is a great little example. Because the center of attention and perspective of the Charlotte Observer is the UNC-Chapel Hill Athletics Department, if RJ Mattes had committed to UNC more than a week ago do you really think that they would not have known about it and covered it? Of course someone in that department would have known about Mattes’ commitment.
But, since they don’t cover all schools equally, they don’t know the news of all schools equally.
Again, it is NOT a conspiracy. Just a simple place in the road where biased perspective intersects with incompetence.
Agreed just poor journalism. One would think the high school reporter covering this would be hungry and eager to do a good job and hopefully move up with a promotion. Guess not.
Also, I was wondering if we were going to lose Javi Lopez soon when pitchers and catchers report? He is starting to come on and would hate to lose another PG at ACC tourney time.
Thanks for not providing the link, we dont want to give their site the hits
“Outlets like the Charlotte Observer are just not very good at what they do. It is called incompetence, not a conspiracy. Add to that a blatant longstanding and uncontestable bias towards certain schools and you have a recipe for that incompetence to manifest itself more”
Exactly. You have to be competent and actually know what you’re doing to conspire against someone or something. Bias, on the other hand, does not require competence or conscious thought whatsoever.
Then N&O also did a great job of covering UNC’s recruiting arse on Sunday with several articles related to why stars don’t matter in football, a mention of UNC’s lastest OL recruit from Wilmington and the the re-recruit of the top tier non-qualifier from Burlington without mentioning any of the bagage. But no where did they mention State in a positive light.
http://www.newsobserver.com/826/story/905381.html
Well - we saw Rawlings comments last week - and now this. Several years ago, Mario committed to the Pack in his junior year very early. UNC got a committment a few months later. The Winston Salem Journal’s Bill Cole wrote that the Heels had the first known committment of the ACC.
This is how bias works. Cole is a UNC guy/grad. He is predisposed to liking his Heels - it’s totally understandable. He follows their recruiting very closely. However, he crossed the line in his excitement. I called him on it, he apologized and sent a note in the paper the next day correcting it.
We also saw the selective outrage by Dave Glenn when AJ Davis signed w/ NC State. Did he subject Butch Davis to the same thing when they got a key WR who switched his committment from Notre Dame to UNC? Was he as outraged when Curry signed w/ the Heels after committing to UVA?
Who says it isn’t a conspiracy?
Every little thing they can do to hurt State recruiting can be considered helpful to Carolina recruiting. If they could get away with it, I’m sure they would not report at all on State recruiting. When other players see all these great players committing to State, it may make THEM want to commit, as well. Carolina journalism grads would surely cover up all they possibly could to do their small part to slow down State’s recruiting success.
I’m not too excited about the Char Ob’s opinion of the top 50 in NC either. They probably just took the Scout or Rivals rankings and moved a few guys around (and the local guys up) so it didn’t look like that copied them.
To find an actual “journalist” or “reporter” any more would be a truely rare thing! Are there any out there - or just opinion columnists writing under the guise of “reporter!”
Is it too late to make a bet with the Observer’s sports department on the outcome of the State/FSU game?
RedTerror– To be fair, the Observer did admit to such:
“The Observer’s Top 50 was based on recruiting analyst’s opinions: Miller Safrit with Scout.com and Allen Wallace with Super Prep Magazine and recruiting lists from rivals.com, espn.com and national recruiting analyst Tom Lemming from cstv.com.”
The only thing the Observer’s sports desk did right was Panthers coverage, but now that Yaz is gone (jumped the sinking McClatchy ship to ESPN.com), I fully expect that beat to regress as well.
Oh, forgot to mention that “Amato hates NC high school football players” myth that was propulgated by the NC media.
You’d always see, “See have criticized Amato for not recruiting the state of North Carolina enough.” Wonder who that some was???
The incompetence of the media is why you see this site and others like it flourish. We used to have to sit back and read it because they were the only game in town.
They have begun their slow slide into complete irrelevance.
Rick
Jan 28th, 2008 at 11:16 am
The incompetence of the media is why you see this site and others like it flourish. We used to have to sit back and read it because they were the only game in town.
I litteraly do not believe a single thing I read in teh N&O anymore. I don’t do it intentially, it’s just my natural reaction. There is not a single thing in that paper that I will believe without checking the facts somewhere else first.
McGlathey=Monopoly=Incompetence
McGlatchey+Carolina Journalism Grad=Biased and Incompetent
Charlotte Observer, N&O, The State=Bottom of the Bird Cage
You don’t want to use it as toilet paper cause the newsprint will come off on your rear end!
Then N&O also did a great job of covering UNC’s recruiting arse on Sunday with several articles related to why stars don’t matter in football
Sort of like an article I put up on Wednesday 1/23 entitled “Recruiting Rankings and On-Field Success which was a follow-up to another article called “The Cult of the Recruiting Gurus where I quoted Jamie Newburg as saying “recruiting rankings don’t mean crap.”
If this had happened once I wouldn’t think twice about it, but on more than a handful of occasions, I have seen SFN or RAWFS feature (non-news) posts end up in the local media soon afterwards. I’m no professional reporter, and do not have the time, Lexis, AP feeds and the like to draw upon, much less any cache’ with our dear friend Annabelle. But somehow the guys here and I have come up with some story ideas that other “professionals” run with.
Interesting, to say the least.
Ken Tysiac of the CharObs is an example of hostility and not just bias. To be sure that I spelled his name right I went down their Sports Headlines until I came to a slam against State. He would honestly deny it if asked, I don’t think he is even aware of it. Usually a day or two after he gets in several digs the same day an older staffer like Ron Green, Jr or David Scott will do kind of a make up article. Those guys have a better sense of history. KT was esp indignant when Coach Sendek left. After Lowe was announced He asked in print, “Is this what you wanted State fans?” I can say yes Ken, this is exactly what I wanted.
SFN: This comment should be bronzed and saved forever. Doug could not be more dead on.
I moved back to Charlotte in September of 2005 and was really surprised and perplexed by the slant created in the OBVIOUS conclusions and presumptions of this guy (Tysiac’s) writings. There was no doubt that he loved Herb and thought State fans were crazy. There is no way that he can deny this slant when random people move from not living here for a decade and see it so clearly that they can’t help but come to the conclusion.
When I saw my first picture of the guy and realized how young he was it was less of a surprise since it was obvious that he didn’t have the historical knowledge or understanding to really frame any of his conclusions. You can tell that the concept of NC State’s program over a 45 year period of Case-Maravich-Sloan-Valvano simply does not resonate with him. I would love to know his background as the odds are high that if he isn’t a home-grown Tarheel then he is from somewhere outside of the region and hasn’t seen a tenth of the ACC Basketball that most of the readers of SFN have seened.
You could say “Sail with the Pilot” to Ken Tysiacs and he would start looking around for John Travolta.
Tysiacs is so eager to get in some “I told you so’s” that all common sense in analysis is going to go out of the window with him. You can rest assured that Coach Lowe’s worst years will be constantly compared with Coach Sendek’s best years and won’t he have been so right!?! In fact, I have actually saved some of his/CHLT OBS articles from the last month weeks because the tone of the articles were so obvious that I wanted to write blog entries about them. Unfortunately I haven’t had time. For others - like doug74 - to see the exact same things as me and my friends is fascinating. But, of course, we’re all crazy and just make this stuff up.
It’s called spin. Everytime Bunting had to let a kid go because he got busted by the police. He was held up for his shining example of tough disciplinarian. I could understand that if it was a few kids, but it was a boatload of football players over the years. Bunting should have been run out of town for bringing in all those questionable kids and not clamping down on them before they committed all those crimes.
They can use the NC State internet community to write stories about how bad we are as fans, but they can’t take the time to check facts on recruting or current basketball player names?
Clarksa, do you mean there’s an NC State internet community outside of The Wolf Web? But there you can look hard enough to find an example of whatever smear you’d like to make against NC State!
“One would think the high school reporter covering this would be hungry and eager to do a good job and hopefully move up with a promotion. Guess not”
That assumes that you have to do a good job to get a promotion, when obviously that is not the case.
The comments and the examples shared in this discussion are absolutely fantastic. This is EXACTLY what makes some of these random entries into classics that you keep for a long time.
SFN or Doug74: Tysiac replaced Doyel, when Doyel moved to Cincinnati, right?
^ RAWFS, unless someone else bridged the timeline then that would make sense.
The thing that surprises me is that this bias has existed for many, many years and those of us on the State side have complained enough but nothing ever changes. Isn’t it logical that these newspapers would see that their incompetence, i.e. the Lenox Rawlings piece, hurts their professionalism more than satisfying the UNC crowd helps them?
Here’s another example of omission such as the Charlotte Observer did in recruiting rather than comission as in the Rawlings piece.
This past Sunday morning I woke up in Chapel Hill. (I was laying under the old well with 12 empty quart bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, my farmer’s overalls were down around my ankles, there was a moaning ram laying beside me. I know, I know what you must be thinking but, hey, I was in Chapel Hill so no one walking by thought it was unusual. The pedestrians walking by probably figured, “Oh, he had a mild night.”)
I joke of course(I don’t drink PBRs), but I did get my free coffee and the Sunday morning paper which was the Durham Herald Sun. Now in the past, with writers such as Al Featherston and Barry Jacobs, I always felt like State got a fair shake with the Durham paper. Since they covered Duke I assumed they didn’t feel they had to cater to the baby blue crowd.
So UNC(thanks to John Swofford) had another 8 day rest break in their schedule and Duke wasn’t to play until Sunday night. So there were no men’s UNC/Duke basketball games to cover for the Sunday edition of the Durham paper. (The fact that UNC didn’t have a game meant there weren’t that many fans in Chapel Hill and probably why the ram was available).
The big game was the UNC women’s double OT win over Maryland and it didn’t surprise me that the Herald Sun headline in the Sunday sports covered that game. But I was sure there would be front page coverage with an ample story about State’s win at FSU. You know, we are one of the big three in the triangle and all that stuff.
Guess what? No front page story re: State v. FSU. There was a story on the front page covering the women’s Australian tennis open.
I open the sports section to pg. 4. The top of the page says proudly, “OUR GAME”, then the statement, “The College Basketball Report”. So the Herald Sun proclaims that college basketball is our region’s game. So let’s see what the headlines are.
First there is a moderately big headline “TIGERS’ STREAK CONTINUES” covering “our” local school, The University of Memphis on page 4. This headline sits atop 5 columns. Also pg.4 has a smaller headline “Salter’s best lifts Wofford”.
On pg. 5 there is a medium sized headline sitting atop 4 columns, “FRESHMAN HEROICS”. Hhhmmm, let’s see, “FRESHMAN”, oh yeah, a college game, there are freshman at every college, right? Someone correct if I am wrong on that assumption.
Well folks thats what we got in the Durham Herald Sun when Duke and UNC didn’t play. A newspaper that claims that college basketball is “OUR GAME” and one of the schools in the area with two national championships isn’t even on the front page in deference to womens’ tennis in Australia.
In addition the school’s name isn’t identified in the headline either. This game finished about 3:40 PM on Saturday, leaving plenty of time to set the sports section.
To add insult to injury the ACC standings are at the top of pg. 4 (Right beside the “OUR GAME” proclamation).
After State’s win at FSU State is in a 4 way tie for fifth place in the ACC standings. This is before Sunday’s games.
But the Herald Sun doesn’t bother to update the standings in “OUR GAME” and still lists State as 1-3 next to last just above UVa.
State, actually 2-3 at this point, is even listed behind Miami which at the time had a 1-3 record
So it appears that even the papers such as the Herald Sun that used to be friendly have succumbed to this “we aren’t interested in anything State” despite their position that college basketball is “OUR GAME”.
^ If it’s correct (and I am pretty sure it is) then there you go, that’s all you need know. Apparently, the CO hired sports raconteurs and not sports journalists.
I realize that sports are entertainment at the end of the day, but there used to be some fairly great writers that covered it back in the day. Guys like Furman Bisher, Jim Murray and Ron Green Senior. Now it seems that many of the sportswriters in some area papers are not much better than message board posters with an agenda and a press pass.
Thing is, at least SFN is up front with its bias. You come here to get things from an NC State point of view. You don’t come here expecting utter neutrality nor sycophants for other schools. Best of all, SFN is more honest in its analysis than many so-called mainstream outlets. When it stinks, they say it stinks. When it’s right, they say it’s right. That’s more than I can say for a number of sportswriters, and I definitely DO NOT believe in the Vast Media Conspiracy Theory. Occam’s Razor tells me that there are hack writers that are playing to a crowd in order to draw ad dollars, not a conspiracy.
Amazing, is it not, that hobbyist writers like you read here are often doing a much better job of covering news than you can get from a printed periodical with tens if not hundreds of thousands of subscribers? Imagine if SFN had access to the resources — interviews with coaches, interviews with players, Nexis, AP, NewsWire, etc.
The future of good sportswriting, the kind that Grantland Rice would be proud of is in blogs, not in newspapers.
I have a correction to my entry above. The Herald Sun DID list State as 2-3 but still behind Miami at 1-3.
Also I apologize for the length of the entry in case it’s more than most of you want to read.
NC State needs to roll out more journalists and less engineers apparently, the media is overpopulated with UNC grads. It’s hard to get your voice out in the newspaper when a majority of journalism majors graduate from UNC and it’s–Supposedly– superior program. You’d think with such a high-class program that they’d at least have a course for checking your facts. Man I hope Lopez gets better.
Even if NC State was consistently fighting with the big boys in basketball every year or hell, even dominating, the media would still have bias simply because of the amount of UNC grads they have in comparison to others. Sad but true.
Sadly, State just needs to get back to greatness and start whipping Carolina and Duke on a regular basis. The media coverage will continue to be biased, but they can’t argue with win-loss records.
Statefans Help! I want to click on the ads to help this site but they are for Charlotte Jobs at the Charlotte Observer and for UNC Final Four tickets! Yuck!
Ads are auto-generated by Google and they are relative to the context of the article.
Ironic, wouldn’t you say, that an article about the Charlotte Observer’s sports writers results in Google placing an ad for UNC tickets?
This is just sour grapes bias. Mattes is from the Charlotte area no? The Clt Obs certainly had covered him recently in an expose as an up-and-coming star and he made their regional all-star teams. Had he picked UNC it would have been a beneath the fold, front page sports article. Maybe they see the writing on the wall, and they don’t like it.
As far as Tysiac goes, he was also dumb quick to shine a light on Lowe’s misspeech that got cited as a violation. Yet he puts a positive spin on a real violation like the illegal “student”/alumini recruiting episode with Mays, Felton and whoever the third cat was.
I wouldn’t call it irony, I’d say it was to be expected.
The only reason I even LOOK at the mews and disturber sports page is to find out the standings of pro leagues (ie NHL) and scores of games I may have missed. Other than that, I give the paper to my folks so their mini schnauzer has something to go piddle on. (I often make sure certain columnists pictures are facung upwards to give the little dog something to aim for.)
Sail with the Pilot. I stopped reading everything after the comment with those 4 words and took a very nice stroll down memory lane.
Bradley has it right! We need new thinking in Raleigh.
Thanks SFN for calling out the Char Obs.
Sail with the Pilot at the wheel,
so get onboard the Pilot Ship today!(I think this was right??)
Starring Jim Thacker and ???? (before Billy Packer)??Trivia Question?
The problem/hurdle/obstacle with reporters like Tysiac is that there is a generation or more of Tarhole, Duke, and State fans that believe the crap he writes cause they are too young to know better and “that bunch of hijackers of State athletics has allowed it to happen”!!
This was posted earlier by someone here on SFN…the old JP commercial itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HznVEfzaEl8
Sail With The Pilot Video
“Starring Jim Thacker and ???? (before Billy Packer)??Trivia Question?”
Bones McKinney
I’m not sure what upsets me more. The sports writers who write some of the crap in the paper or the small portion of NC State fans that constantly scream black helicopter and conspiracy theory when you point out a biased article.
Thanks for keeping a running tally of some of these articles. It’s a helpful tool to remind some Pack fans who seem to have selective memory.
Wasn’t there someone else before Bones? I’m drawing a blank on his name though.
As far as media bias, I noticed that in the Sunday CltObs, the Pack win against FSU was on page 8C, can’t even remember what was on 1-7, but the headline basically said the win was a result of Fell’s unintentional backshot 3 pointer — lucky “bank” shot, not the rest of the great play….just another example…also, there was not even a write-up about the VT game. Again, the majority of these “writers” and editors are UNC grads, and after awhile, you just come to expect it.
^ You are correct. The whole focus of the win was about our luck and unintentional bank shot. One can only imagine if NC State had won two national titles by having the other team throw us the ball on the last possession or call a time out that didn’t exist on the last possession of the national championship game.
Yep. As predicted, the Observer’s Panthers beat sucks again. Chad Johnson wants to be traded to the Panthers but you wouldn’t know from reading the CO. The Observer has TWO reporters in Arizona for the SuperBowl and they STILL miss the biggest off-season story so far. (ht: meckdeck)