ZBU: Yesterday, USC senior cornerback Josh Shaw admitted to lying about how he suffered two high ankle sprains over the weekend. What's the big deal? Well on Sunday, Shaw came out saying he injured himself Saturday night after jumping from the second story of an apartment complex to save his 7-year-old nephew, who was struggling in the pool. Shaw said his nephew did not know how to swim. By Monday morning, thanks to social media and the "mother ship" as Dan Patrick calls it, Shaw was a superhero athlete with a heart-warming story. Today of course after admitting the entire story was a complete fabrication, Shaw is being demonized by the same media outlets. Now, there are many angles we can explore with his topic and I do think creating such a story was completely idiotic and pretty disgusting, but the two questions I have are what drove a man to make up such a fantastical tale and have all source-checking journalists with integrity died and gone to heaven?
To address my first question, I think more details are going to surface and it is going to come out that Shaw was doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing and he will most likely get a slap on the wrist. But talk about making a bad situation worse! How could you possibly think that making up a heroic tale of rescuing a child's life was going to pass unquestioned? Maybe Shaw just panicked and one lie led to another until he was Super Shaw. Or maybe he was advised to go with the story and hope no witnesses were around to question the facts. But I guess what has really got to me about this whole situation (because there will always be liars building themselves up) is how does such an incredible story get reported without ANYONE checking the facts! I am now a banker and my journalist dream died long ago so maybe I don't know the stresses this day and age of being the first one to report a story, but I do know a little bit about being thorough and taking pride in work that I will be attaching my name to. We live in an incredible age of technology where news is easily reported and dispatched to the world but that does not mean all integrity should be thrown away.
Is Shaw a complete knucklehead who should be ridiculed and suspended for creating a despicable lie? Absolutely. But let's not lose sight of the other problem in this story. If all source-checking, journalists with integrity aren't dead yet, there is certainly an epidemic slowly killing them off.
PAV: I think respectable journalism is dying. Shaw was either drunk and miscalculated the two-story jump or he was fleeing an apartment (as I've heard in certain rumors). He's young and was probably embarrassed because he knew he'd injured himself. He's no monster. He lied, but who hasn't? ESPN will run this story into the ground for the next few weeks and then get more play out of it once Shaw returns for USC.
News corporations are just looking for the next "breaking" story. They don't consider sources important until they have to back track. It's too easy for a media outlet to apologize and move on than to miss a story all together. ESPN did this recently when their worst "journalist" by far, Josina Anderson, reported on Michael Sam's showering habits. She was trying to create a story out of nothing. Her own magazine covered and cleared that issue a few months ago during OTA's. Someone made a choice to fuck credibility out the window in the last few decades regarding news reporting and everyone else has followed along. I read a UFO story on the Huffington Post site the other day. I used to consider that publication to be somewhat credible, but they posted a story on a poorly shot amateur video and headlined with: "UFO Caught by Canadian News..."
Honestly, I blame the utter ignorance of the public for all of this. If we didn't give the Kardashians and the Real House Wives such high ratings, then news groups wouldn't feel the need to dump idiotic and meaningless stories onto our laps. It's all about money and those corporations are raking it in because the average news-watching citizen is happy to lap up the garbage that calls itself "late breaking news".
Sidetrack: Why don't we hear about breakthroughs in science and technology? Our intellectual elite have come up with some incredible technology in the last few years that will benefit mankind, but no one gives a shit. I recommend everyone follow IFL (I Fucking Love) Science on twitter or read Scientific American. It's refreshing to read about nanotechnology and what people are doing with stem cells and gene research. Of course, there are negative stories aimed at shocking people, but there's research behind all of it. I love research. I love logic. I love direct and clean information. ESPN and most major news outlets have none of those things.
