Agreed. In my purely biased opinion, I lay some of the blame at the feet of the 24-hour news networks. Especially in cases like the London bombings today, where you have to fill the air time and sometimes there's just nothing new to report. So the talking heads start speculating.
I had originally skimmed over this thread.. ok maybe I didn't read it at all, but after checking out your post, and trying to see where evidence of this was.. All I can say is that I hope I run into CBC this weekend. I passed him by last Saturday, and I'd fancy a conversation in which I confront him about my apparent lack of class and see if he'd tell me it to my face.
I thought it was CBC? Who's Hunter? Maybe I should have read the first page of this thread.. Edit: Peter, I'm pretty sure in someone's post they quoted Merz as saying: "Kicking someone when he's down is easy. Standing up for Andrulis is not. He's an extremely nice man with a great personality who cares deeply for his players. He has shown far more class than the fans who berate him wherever he goes." That's what I was referring to.. So what's the deal with this Hunter dude?
Hunter didn't say anything about Crew fans. The only mention he gave them in that piece was that the Crew was considering canning the bearded one. The general tone of the piece was that most of the time, fans think they know more than the coach/manager, but really don't. He gave no special mention to Crew fans.
Hunter's logic was bad anyway. You don't have to be the captain of a ship to know that it's sinking, and everyone can see that the good ship Crew has been taking on a lot of water lately.
My apologies, Jason. As you have probably guessed, One of my hot button is balance and context in journalism (written is better than TV). Partial disclosure and spectacularization of data (eg.$25,000,000 is a spectacular number for individuals, but if it's 1% of a larger pool it's in context and perhaps a nominal variance) cause the less informed to make decisions that are affected by....propoganda. This is particularly prevalent in heath care and finance where emotional triggers run closer to the surface and there are massive PR dollars subsidizing "Press releases" and "Marketing bulletins". It's obvious to me that Statistics 101 should be a requirement for a journalism degree (Wall Street Journal "reporters" included).
Statistics and the like usually is, at least where I went to school. I took marketing, economics, leadership, business math, religion, classical music appreciation, etc. all as requirements for my journalism degree.
I just basically wanted to highlight this again. Perception is reality. If the customers say it is crap, then it IS crap. Even if it is not intrinsically crap, it is crap as far as a product in the marketplace. The attendance numbers speak for themselves. Once again, I quote Yogi Berra...."If the fans don't want to come out to the ballpark, you can't stop 'em." Sirk
Understood. If you only knew how many times I had to fix math errors....simple ones, like percentages of things and figuring that X mills of tax for a property valued Y equals Z. I actually didn't go to journalism school. My journalism experience was gained the old-fashioned way: start at a weekly (my first editor didn't have much use for journalism schools either. He said he'd rather have poli sci grads -- like me -- who can come onto the job already knowing how a township government works), then keep moving up the ladded. The original plan was to go to law school. I'm sure Bill Archer and others will thank me for not adding to the lawyer pool.
I agree with this too. When I had a chance to speak with John Wagner a couple weeks ago I pointed out how small the crowd was compared with BaB nights of years past. The weather was beautiful, there was a popular promotion, we had a quality opponent (Revs), and there were maybe 11k present. Turned out there were even fewer. I attributed it to the fans having seen Crew soccer rather than not being aware of it. The part I didn't say to John is that there isn't really a marketing solution til the coach changes. The team has lost credibility with its fanbase. More marketing would amount to saying to potential customers "who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"