Today’s Charlotte Observer provides us a great opportunity to bring a couple of recent stories together for a quick note. There is certainly nothing earth shattering here; just some interesting observations.
Earlier this week we shared two different entries that you should read if you havent. One was an entry focused on NC State football recruiting in light of Sterling Lucas’ commitment to the Wolfpack on Tuesday (click here for link). The other was a good entry that turned into a fantastic conversation about the media that was built on the Charlotte Observer’s poor and slow coverage of NC State football recruiting (click here for link).
[Oh the irony that Sterling Lucas committed early on Tuesday and the Observer saw fit to get it into the paper on Thursday.]
Our readers shared some particularly great thoughts in the comments of the media entry that included some specfic discussion about the general aggression and attitude of the Charlotte Observer’s, Ken Tysiac. We aren’t going to turn this entry into a referrendum on on Tysiac as I don’t have the energy. But, I did want to share the big news he wrote regarding Sterling Lucas’ commitment in today’s Observer as I found it fascinating.
Before I share his words, I again refer you to our entry reporting the commitment that we hammered out in 15 minutes on Tuesday afternoon so that you can see what our thoughts were on the topic. We’re certainly not journalists, but we think that we have a pretty good grasp on what is important and relevant to NC State.
So, let’s play a quick game of multiple choice to give you the chance to choose the most interesting, relevant and/or newsworthy issue/item/topic regarding Sterling Lucas’ commitment to NC State?
(A) Lucas’ strong senior year and performance that led to major regional and national attention and offers from many major schools that resulted in a direct battle between USC, UNC and NC State?
(B) The class of four highly-ranked linebackers that Tom O’Brien has put together this year in light of the dearth of talent at that key position that was left by the last staff?
(C) The impressive talent Coach O’Brien is assembling across all positions his first true recruiting class that currently has NC State ranked in ESPN’s Top 20 recruiting classes in the country and in the Top 25 of average star ratings of commitments at Scout.com and Rivals.com?
…let’s see….I need a 4th option just to make this fun but I can’t think of anything else…I’ll just make-up something stupid and irrelevant to have a ‘joke option’….how about…
(D) That Sterling Lucas grew up in the great state of South Carolina. (LOL! How less important can something be?) And, interestingly, NC State hasn’t received a commitment from a South Carolina high school player this year.
So…what how did Ken Tysiac and the Charlotte Observer report Sterling Lucas’ commitment this morning?
Linebacker is first S.C. Wolfpack commitment
Shrine Bowl star is state’s No. 12 prospect
KEN TYSIACShrine Bowl defensive MVP Sterling Lucas gave coach Tom O’Brien his first 2008 commitment from South Carolina when he chose N.C. State this week.
Lucas (6-foot-2, 220 pounds) is a middle linebacker from Orangeburg-Wilkinson who made eight tackles and had an interception and fumble recovery in the Shrine Bowl. As a senior, he led O-W with 168 tackles.
“He’s a great run stopper and an outstanding athlete,” said O-W coach Reggie Kennedy.
Scout.com rates Lucas as the 12th-best prospect in South Carolina. Kennedy said North Carolina and South Carolina were Lucas’ other two finalists.
O’Brien has had success recruiting in the state of North Carolina with 11 commitments for 2008, according to scout.com, but hadn’t received a South Carolina commitment before Lucas.
WOW.
One headline and five sentences and the headline and two of the sentences focused on the massively important news that Coach Tom O’Brien has not yet landed a player from the state of South Carolina. The headline detailing the most important item of the story and and 40% of the article focused on the BIG NEWS and fabricated ‘importance’ that NCSU/TOB has MISSED by failing to land players who went to high school in South Carolina.
WOW.
Just as long as this kid doesn’t try to bring in that nasty mustard barbecue, we’ll get along just fine!
I also find it interesting that all the local sports radio reports failed to mention that Lucas was recruited by USC, Michigan State, Maryland, WFU, AND UNC! They were sure to mention the others, but not that TOB out recruited Butchy!
It should be obvious to all parties why it was made out to be a big deal that TOB hadn’t gotten any commits from SC….Charlotte secretly wishes to be annexed by that proverbial stepchild of the Old North State. IMHO…..Let ‘Em HAVE CHARLOTTE! Good riddance to bad rubbish.
GO WOLFPACK….BEAT DOOK!!
again, thanks for not providing a link to the Chlt Obsvr.
And if he is going to go that route… maybe he should mention the loads of talent that TOB and staff have landed from PA, GA, NY, OH, VA and even freakin Canada… thats right CANADA in this recruiting class! TOB has done an outstanding job this yr. First, by Making a statement that landing the best in state talent is a priority, and then diversifying our talent pool to include not only southern states but also mid west, and northern states that we had previously not had connections to…. NO NO that would be too much for Ole ken.
Pissiac or whatever his name is has to ignore the recruiting success TOB has had in NC. If he focuses on that it becomes obvious ‘ol Butch-slap got butch-slapped in NC recruiting this year.
As far as SC goes, there are athletes there. Keep in mind what TOB said in Greensboro last June -”The previous staff left some good athletes. I don’t know how many will make football players”. For sheer population numbers it would be stupid for TOB to focus on SC instead of NC. Show’em how it’s done TOB.
Everyone talked about Amato ignoring the state of North Carolina…but I can think of plenty of players from NC that we recruited, signed and played. And many more who we recruited and went elsewhere.
But what was suprising was how FEW players from both South Carolina and Virginia we even chased. From VA (excluding prep schoolers), we landed a TE who never came here and Jay Smith..and that was about it. From South Carolina, we got JC Neal. If we signed anyone else, I can’t think of them.
You generally recruit where you’ve got contacts. When Joe Pate was here, he had contacts in Alabama and Texas which led to us getting Rivers, Cotchery, Rod Johnson and George Anderson.
Sheridan’s staff had contacts throughout South Carolina, so we ended up getting guys like Ray Robinson, Andy Hastings, Joe Gray, and plenty of others.
I’ve been surprised that we haven’t seen more kids from prep schools in Ohio in this class.
noah, i thought there were a few from OH in this class? i could be wrong though. or are you just saying you thought there would be 5-6 from OH in this class and are surprised we only have a couple
Instead of getting off his arse and researching why this recruit may be significant to the program, Tysiac just lazily skims down his pre-supplied list of NCSU recruits to see if anyone else is from SC and decides that’s as far as he’s going to go.
File this in the overflowing cabinet of evident that the Observer’s sports desk is irrelevant.
Statefansnation staff - Please use this article as a textbook example of media bias and how it reveals itself.
Any time a journalist writes a story, they can choose a # of paths to go down and still be truthful. It’s the overall tone of the article and selective reporting that will reveal the bias.
As you rightly note, the writer here could have gone several different routes w/ this options. Personally, I don’t see how you could find a way to paint this commitment in a negative light - but he did. But his defense will be “What’s false about this article.”
He chooses to take an angle which could lead the casual reader to conclude the following: This was NC State’s first commitment for 2008. This was TOBs first committment. That TOB wasn’t recruiting very well.
Personally, I think the article should have read - Wolfpack Gets Committment from Shrine Bowl MVP.
It speaks volumes that this writer tried to paint this committment as negatively as possible.
“noah, i thought there were a few from OH in this class? i could be wrong though. or are you just saying you thought there would be 5-6 from OH in this class and are surprised we only have a couple”
Nope. There’s no one in this class, so far, who is from Ohio.
It’s the same old biased stuff that the Charlotte rag has been printing for at least 50 years!
Noah^^ wow, i thought there was an OL commit from OH, was that last yr? was Vermiglio from OH?
Choppack, exactly!
Tone, word choice, what’s said vs. what isn’t said, and other (usually) subtleties tend to convey bias.
My position on media bias has been stated before. I am not defending this article, but it seems more lazy than bias. It’s like “Hey, Ken we need something on this kid committing to State,” and he chose the angle that required little more than a click on rivals.com and a call to the coach.
Have there been any Tysiac stories on UNC recruiting of late to compare this too? That would frame this ‘bias’ better.
^ Not necessarily. The guy could generally not like NC State without having to have a pro-UNC bias.
I agree with the laziness comments…but, even there the article seems to highlight that it is some kind of a MISS or a DEFICIENCY (which is a ‘negative’ perspective) that NC State hasn’t landed a SC recruit this year.
seems like Ken and the C.O. sports team just don’t know more about NCSU football recruiting - and they don’t want to know…
PacknSack - I’m not saying the writer isn’t lazy, but to just dismiss this as lazy gives him way too much benefit of the doubt.
He obviously checked Scout to see the # of NC committments. As SFN notes - he chose to go w/ the most negative possible angle to approach this. This is a classic case where someone tips their hand. He lives in Charlotte and should know that we’ve gotten a couple of good commits from the area - and he probably does. It’s like he’s saying, “How can I make this look bad?”
Also, what’s your position on bias?
You seem to miss the point that the Observer is trying to sell papers in South Carolina so they take every opportunity to mention the state. It’s the “local boy does well” syndrome.
SFN: How many extra papers did they sell with this headline on the bottom inside of page 5 or 7 of the sports page? How can they sell more papers with this story if you have to buy the newspaper to find out about the story? How many fifty cent newspapers do you need to sell to reclaim your integrity as a journalist?
The entire “their goal is to sell newspapers” argument is always one of the least logistical things in the world. It is just one of those things that sounds great so everyone repeats it without truly thinking about it.
SC is a great pool of talent that would greatly benefit us in limiting not only UNC’s power but Clemson as well. Tammy may have been right when he said they didn’t recruit against NC State, but a big part of that was our fault for neglecting the state.
You seem to miss the point that the Observer is trying to sell papers in South Carolina so they take every opportunity to mention the state. It’s the “local boy does well” syndrome.
By that logic, the CO would have mentioned “Shrine Bowl MVP” in the article.
I can assure you Tysiac isn’t the reason for anyone in SC to buy his newspaper. Like I’ve said before, I live in Rock Hill and both of the local news sources, the Charlotte Obs and The Herald in Rock Hill, are both owned by McGlatchey. If I subscribed to The State in Columbia, it’s also owned by McGlatchey.
I think the entire thing is the quality of McGlatchey’s hires is directly related to the crap that they put out. I had a friend in the newspaper business(who has since retired), but McGlatchey tried to recruit him to Rock Hill a number of years ago. He laughed at the offer and told them “NO”~!
However, Tysiac seems to have a “bug up his butt” and is on a definite anti NC State mission. He’s not just lazy and unqualified, he “has a cause” for some reason.
It’s not just the Charlotte Observer…newspapers all across the country show enormous amounts of bias. Then they say that the reason their distribution is down is because of blogs and the internet. In actuality their distribution is down because they only speak to one audience. I don’t mean to get political, but in the political realm…most papers speak with a liberal agenda and bias. In the sports realm, in our state, the bias is toward UNC. While there may be more UNC fans than any other school, the tone and biases used offend every other potential reader. There are more fans from N.C. State, Duke, Wake, ECU, and App. St. than there are Tarholes…so the paper has limited their readership to only one fanbase instead of appealing to all.
This article is ramshit. You guys are right…it couldn’t have been any more negative. Articles like this give advantages to the tarholes in recruiting throughout the state as it implies that N.C. State is mediocre at best. What will they do when Coach O’Brien wins an ACC title?
^ That he cheated somehow. That’s the usual claim when NC State achieves success.
“You seem to miss the point that the Observer is trying to sell papers in South Carolina so they take every opportunity to mention the state. It’s the “local boy does well” syndrome.”
It’s not the local boy does well syndrome. It’s the NC State finally decides to recruit SC syndrome - if you give the writer the benefit of the doubt. They don’t spend as much time in the article discussing NC State’s SC recruiting as they do discussing the kid. It’s really almost bizarre the stance that he’s taking.
Jim Valvano - One of my opinions is that since the MSM has been called on this and other outlets have emerged, that they have been more comfortable being biased than they ever were. It’s as if they say, “State fans don’t read us anyway - so who cares about giving them a fair shake.” I’ll never forget the Winston Salem Journal Headline photo captions during the Edwards-Faircloth Senate race. Photo of Lauch Faircloth - caption “Faircloth has rec’d over $X million from Hunt donors. Photo of Edwards - caption “Edwards Supports Health Care Reform.”
This article is almost on par w/ that one.
For media bias, this is not a good example. He does point out we’ve had success recruiting in North Carolina, with 11 in-state commits, which makes me think he’s not trying to really skew things, since he could’ve omitted that crucial bit of information and only mentioned getting one SC committment.
SFN: To split hairs…he says that we recruited 11 players from NC. Who is to say that is merits ’success’? They certainly don’t make that conclusion. As I stated, this is not a big deal or a big indication of ‘bias’. But, read the comments about Tysiac hat were written by different people in the previous entry. It is all about a slow and consistent slant of never painting anything in a positive light. It is not that any one situation like this is that ‘bad’.
Hearing good things about us getting Leon Mackey. Makes a lot of since too. He could play either DE or DT or both at the same time if we run a 3-4. This staff put some serious thought into this class.
BV - I’m trying to figure out just what would piss you off: So for clarification, you think this would be a biased article:
“Shrine Bowl defensive MVP Sterling Lucas gave coach Tom O’Brien his first 2008 commitment from South Carolina when he chose N.C. State this week.
Lucas (6-foot-2, 220 pounds) is a middle linebacker from Orangeburg-Wilkinson who made eight tackles and had an interception and fumble recovery in the Shrine Bowl. As a senior, he led O-W with 168 tackles.
“He’s a great run stopper and an outstanding athlete,” said O-W coach Reggie Kennedy.
Scout.com rates Lucas as the 12th-best prospect in South Carolina. Kennedy said North Carolina and South Carolina were Lucas’ other two finalists.
O’Brien [remove]has had success recruiting in the state of North Carolina with 11 commitments for 2008, according to scout.com [/remove]hadn’t received a South Carolina commitment before Lucas.”
Wow, it’s so different than the one he wrote. It doesn’t take much to make you happy - just one phrase. OTOH, here’s the article if you take out the Negative/misleadding Stuff:
“Linebacker [remove]is first[/remove] S.C. Wolfpack commitment
Shrine Bowl star is state’s No. 12 prospect”
Shrine Bowl defensive MVP Sterling Lucas gave coach Tom O’Brien his [remove]first 2008 [/remove]commitment from South Carolina when he chose N.C. State this week.
Lucas (6-foot-2, 220 pounds) is a middle linebacker from Orangeburg-Wilkinson who made eight tackles and had an interception and fumble recovery in the Shrine Bowl. As a senior, he led O-W with 168 tackles.
“He’s a great run stopper and an outstanding athlete,” said O-W coach Reggie Kennedy.
Scout.com rates Lucas as the 12th-best prospect in South Carolina. Kennedy said North Carolina and South Carolina were Lucas’ other two finalists.
O’Brien has had success recruiting in the state of North Carolina with 11 commitments for 2008, according to scout.com,[Remove] but hadn’t received a South Carolina commitment before Lucas.[/Remove]
It’s all about how you choose to present your facts. He chose to take the angle “TOB hasn’t recruitied a lot SC players” . The professional thing to do would have been to simply state that NC State got a committment from the defensive Shrine Bowl MVP. But hey Billy - I’m glad Tysiac is meeting your needs for objectivity.
^ This is an EXCELLENT post that makes my point better than I did!!
Thanks
I gotta tell you…this entire thread is why sports reporters and editors don’t pay attention to: Blogs, fans, their readers, callers, people who write letters to the editor.
You can counter that with, “Well, that’s why their circulation sucks!”
Okay. It’s not, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and believe that.
Tysaic is pointing out that we got our first commitment from a kid from South Carolina. Why is that news? Because since about 1999, the only kid I can think of from South Carolina is JC Neal.
So…in one year, O’Brien has as many Palmetto State recruits as Amato landed in his entire time.
That might be news to people who read a paper that gets read in South Carolina.
But, if you’d like to nail yourself to the cross and decide that this part of a much larger conspiracy — feel free.
Oh, those evil reporters! Grrrr!
Actually, I am a bit surprised that SFN has had very little to say about our first trip to Cameron in a while and how we haven’t won there since the V era.
Not criticizing, but to me the game tonight is NCSU topic #1 no matter how much Duke is favored by. If the stars were to align, world collide and the Gods go crazy and somehow NC State springs an upset, it’s news on the national scale. Sure, it probably won’t happen, but other than potentially grinding the Pack’s “allowable remaining losses” in the regular season to a mere three games (with dates against Duke, Carolina and Clemson to come) there’s precious little to lose tonight.
Damn that TOB. He focuses on recruiting NC to the exclusion of SC. Someone in NC should write an article about that so that all the readers of the Charlotte Observer in other states will ponder the signficance of all this.
I sense a Pultizer on the horizon…
Its pretty clear that the Tysiac apologizers here don’t read the Observer sports section very often. I’m willing to bet that most of you are in other markets and read another outlet.
This kind of tripe gets published daily, and Tysiac is clearly the biggest offender.
DUKE THREAD, DUKE THREAD!!
anyone go to the Word of God vs. Ravenscroft game last night? alot of coaches there last night - K, Dawkins, Hewitt, Baylor, Ole Miss, and yes, Coach Lowe.
Chop has it. The effect of bias is a slow, grinding on your thought process. It’s like erosion if you don’t focus on it, or notice the semantics. Or a puzzle that has the desired effect after the various pieces (articles with apparent bias) are put together.
A college professor of mine gave me a saying that I always remember when reading anything media related.
“They can’t tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about”
In this article, the subtle jab that TOB has not recruitied SC very much doesn’t have any positive slant for UNC. Because they haven’t landed a SINGLE player from the Palmetto state. The reasons for this could be many. Either as a positive for Clemson and USC not losing homegrown talent, or as a negative that UNC and NCSU might win more with SC players.
But that wouldn’t suit the writer’s intended effect. The way the fact was positioned, with an introductory mention and a summarized repetition, means to me the writer wanted that point made with no frame of reference. Other than NC State hasn’t signed a lot of SC players. Just to throw some more rain in the process of erosion.
I emailed Mr. Tysiac wondering why he mentioned South Carolina 3 times in the short article and threw in a seemily backhanded compliment in that last sentence. Here is Ken’s response:
“The purpose of the S.C. thing was to note that N.C. State got a big-time prospect in a state that’s not easy to crack because Spurrier and Bowden do such a good job keeping kids in-state.”
So is he biased? I don’t know the guy personally so I don’t know. He didn’t do a very good job of making the point in the article that he explained to me. By adding in something about our lack of success recruiting the Palmetto state in the past or about how the other in-state ACC schools have a total of zero commitments from SC would have made his point much clearer.
A more seasoned or talented writer (or maybe just unbiased) would have noticed that NC State has more commitments from the state of South Carolina than UNC, Duke and Wake… COMBINED.
Guys, guys, guys.
As I have said time and again, complain all you want…..to end media bias the best medicine is to win and win consistently and cleanly.
Do that and it all goes away. Keep wallowing in the mire we’ve been in for years and it keeps going.
“Tysaic is pointing out that we got our first commitment from a kid from South Carolina. Why is that news? Because since about 1999, the only kid I can think of from South Carolina is JC Neal.
So…in one year, O’Brien has as many Palmetto State recruits as Amato landed in his entire time. ”
Those would be valid points if he said that this was NC State’s first SC recruit since JC Neal or if they had made the connection from an earlier post - that Sheridan and MOC recruited a good deal of kids from there. He doesn’t mention Amato neglecting the area - he specifically mentions it being TOB’s first SC recruit - and he dwells on it.
As a matter of fact, if you read this article - you know the following about NC State’s recruiting class:
1) This is their fist SC committment this year. (A point they make 3 times.)
2) They have 11 kids from NC.
Of course, we do know that sports writers and editors pay attention to blogs - they just don’t like them. They don’t like them because these blogs/webistes do a better job of covering recruiting and various teams than they do. I imagine they don’t like them because these sites can easily link back to their previous articles and demonstrate something like this.
GRRRR those evil bloggers!!!!
“The purpose of the S.C. thing was to note that N.C. State got a big-time prospect in a state that’s not easy to crack because Spurrier and Bowden do such a good job keeping kids in-state”
If this is the purpose, he could have said, NC State is the only Big 4 school to have a verbal from a Top 25 SC player this year. There’s no evidence that this was a problem shared by schools in the other 49 states - just an NC State problem.
I could talk about bias for days - I don’t think its any worse then it has been for years - and certainly not the kind you had 70 yrs ago. You have to fight your bias, which we all have, work to mitigate it in your writing - news, history, anything. If you are lazy, it infects your perspective, and thus your product. How can you view anything objectively, unless you are uninterested . . . and how do you make a career out of something you are uninterested in? (though I know many of you probably are).
BUT even if you think you are objective, you can’t control the reaction of the readers - who come with their own world view, which colors how they interpret the product.
now on to what is really on my mind -
BEAT DOOK, BEAT DOOK, BEAT DOOK
please
I’ll settle for showing up.
Statefans - Rest easy, because thanks to sites like this, I could give a crap what Charlotte Obs. writes. Newspapers are pretty much irrelevant to me, and I’m pushing 40.
So how relevant are they to future NC State athletes?
Choppack, I didn’t see any bio info in the blog re: Tysiac so I did a little i-net research.
Tysiac doesn’t live in Charlotte. He lives in Raleigh and works in the Raleigh bureau for the Ch. Ob. & is charged with covering the ACC. He went to Notre Dame. But as I have written before on SFN the UNC alumni apparently have great influence on the national media & Tysiac is another sad sap in that regards. The fact that Tysiac went to ND doesn’t mean he isn’t a UNC fan or has at least been drinking the UNC Koolaid.
Now maybe you have no choice but to slap State and blow smoke up UNC’s you know what if you work for the Ch.Obsvr. Whatever the reason I suppose as long as the landed gentry’s descendants(since the 1700’s & UNC attendees)control most of the wealth in this state they will get what they want in the newspapers.
Bad timing, I suppose, we were 100 years too late in opening the gates to the school so I guess we have less influence. However you would think that a school(BabyBlueU) that markets itself as the sole possessor of class in the entire academic world would finally show some in it’s action and let’s it’s journalism legions print the truth without bias. (But that’s the old talk the talk and no walk the walk saying.)
To say that Tysiac’s spin is a reult of being lazy is akin to saying Bill Clinton does not know the real meaning of “is”.
Tysiac had to be inventive to come up with the theme of that article. I bet it took him some time instead of reporting the obvious.
My parents in Hickory used to get the CO, but I am proud to say they dropped it years ago.