October
DeadSpin, Brett Favre and Jenn Sterger: Is Real Journalism Dead?
It’s hard to know where to begin to criticize deadspin.com’s slanted, gossipy, uncorroborated reporting of Brett Favre’s alleged messages to Jenn Sterger. Let’s just get this out of the way right now: However distasteful it may be to see one of the most well-known athletes in all of sports at the center of a sex scandal, there are plenty of indications that that’s the case. But the story hardly ends there. Deadspin asks the reader at the start of its first post to “please suspend your disbelief for a moment”**, and apparently you’re never supposed to take it back.
If you, the reader, take two things away from this note, I would like them to be the following:
1) The knowledge that nothing has been proven against Favre to this point, that there is no conclusive evidence that Favre was the man in the voicemails, and none of the parties involved–Favre, Sterger, the Jets, the Vikings, anyone–have provided any supporting evidence for this conjecture, or even acknowledged it.
2) Full and complete understanding that whatever Deadspin’s pretensions in their various posts, they are nothing more than a sketchy, low-end, openly biased media outlet who broke a story and are now trying to milk it for everything they possibly can.
