In 2012 Rick Reilly finally woke up to the fact that Notre Dame is not really a college football powerhouse. Great. The rest of us knew that about fifteen years ago. In any other profession 15 years late would be an embarrassment. Not in journalism. There, the late discovery of the obvious truth is actually the standard.
Reporters are supposed to tell us two things: a) something we didn't already know, or b) a new way to look at something we do already know. Here, Reilly is telling us what we already know, for the exact same reasons we already knew it, 15 years after we first learned it. He also admits (implicitly) that his judgment was clouded for personal reasons (he's "Irish"--hey, we knew that too). Last month, Reilly also admitted to personal bias affecting a Paterno hagiography he wrote twenty years ago. Of course, he had to include in that admission that he didn't really know what a hagiography was cuz that's a big word and he's one of the guys or whatever. No, we're the guys. You, Reilly, are supposed to know what words mean and stuff.
Reporters are not ALL supposed to be low-rent Andy Rooneys running around saying "huh, what's this twitter contraption all about" 8 years after we've STOPPED using it. They are supposed to be on the cutting edge because they are supposed to be curious. They are supposed to sniff things out. They are supposed to hold our institutions accountable, not be blinded by personal loyalty or curmudgeonly incompetence to their flaws. It would be like a lawyer screwing up a case because he didn't know the law had changed and saying, "huh, they shouldn't have changed that law. When I was a kid, that wasn't the law. And what's this internet machine all about anyway?"
I heard Julius Peppers on the radio about 8 years ago. He could not speak English any better than a 5 year old kid. I'm not mocking him. It's just a fact (a sad one). It was so bad that the guy interviewing him (no genius himself) couldn't help making fun of Peppers afterward. I (non-reporter and thus curious guy that I am) thought: how the hell did that guy stay eligible for four years? Seriously, I did. It's not really a Sherlockian intuitive leap to wonder how could a guy who cannot complete a sentence can possibly maintain any GPA at all at a school like Carolina. But apparently no reporter has ever had the same question pop in his head long enough to try to find out. If UNC hadn't "accidentally" (I suspect it was somebody within the school fed up with this bullshit that did it) released Peppers' transcript we might never know. Rick Reilly wouldn't have found out.
The media industry is in the midst of a great upheavel brought upon by its own failure to perform its core mission properly. The industry itself thinks it is about pay walls and other stuff that is beside the point. It's about doing the job well. Whoever does the job well will survive. Everybody else will go down the tubes, but they probably won't realize it for 15 years after the last big flush.
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