Ass Media

Some of you may be reading this post because you are optimistic that it will have something to do with delicious heinie. Sorry to let you down, but we have other places on this site for you to find such material.

No, my friends, this is merely a play on the words “mass media,” and a look at those in it who have sucked the most ass lately. Naturally, our starting point is ESPN.

The most awkward moment in TV this weekend — and in perhaps any walk of life — came during Day 2 of the NFL Draft coverage, as Erin Andrews plopped on a couch between former Texas wideout and prospective draftee Quan Cosby and the unrelated but still there anyway Bill Cosby. Actually, it was more of a sofa than a couch. At any rate, Erin was trying to be funny, but hot usually doesn’t translate to funny, so it wasn’t working. And then you add in the fact that Quan Cosby wasn’t actually drafted … well, I think it’s one of those moments everyone involved would like to forget about in five years. (Although I have to give props to Quan — if I wasn’t getting drafted, I wouldn’t mind having to sit through all seven hours of painful waiting with Erin Andrews and Bill Cosby.)

But hey, at least it was an attempt to be light-hearted, which still works out to be far less annoying than ESPN’s aggressive pushing of the Red Sox-Yankees brand as the only baseball teams you would ever possibly want to watch. I have no qualms about this being the Sunday Night Baseball selection this week. What does bother me, though, is that Sunday and Monday episodes of SportsCenter included a 90-second or so montage of “the best moments of this weekend’s Red Sox-Yankees series.”

Uh, fellas. IT WAS A FUCKING THREE-GAME SWEEP IN APRIL! THERE IS NO NEED FOR A FUCKING MONTAGE!

And then there’s ESPN’s hockey coverage. Stop laughing and bear with me for a second. On Monday night’s Sports Center, Barry Melrose said of the Ducks series victory over the Sharks, “This was shocking. No one saw this coming.”

I really do like Barry M., but “no one saw this coming” was clearly playing into Neil Everett’s lead-in question of “How shocking was this?” Because it wasn’t shocking at all. We saw it coming right here at Rumors and Rants. (Not only did TheRiot predict Ducks in six, he pointed out that Melrose himself considered them his playoff sleeper. Something in that mullet gel must have seeped into his brain in the past two weeks.)

Between all these barbs, I would like to point out that I really have enjoyed Versus coverage of the Blackhawks-Flames series — mostly because they farmed the coverage out to TSN, the Canadian sports network. You could tell that color guy Pierre McGuire and whoever that guy is doing play-by-play really knew what they were talking aboot. Even if they could sometimes be homeresque toward the Canadian team, I loved hearing factoids about “so-and-so were teammates in juniors for the Medicine Hat so-and-so’s” that you wouldn’t get on an American telecast. So basically ESPN no longer having NHL coverage might be the best thing for the sport. Plus, they had a promo for the season premiere of “Canada’s Worst Handyman,” which looks far better than any American television choice I can think of.

But please don’t be fooled by the segue into positivity, as I have more bitching to do. This time, we’ll divert ourselves from the broadcast medium into the world of print. Despite Egon Spengler’s protestations, it is still alive. Sort of.

In his column assessing the winners and losers of this year’s NFL Draft, Chicago Tribune football columnist Dan Pompei listed the top winners of the draft as “Dope Smokers.”

Really? Dope smokers? Is Dan Pompei a fucking sheriff in Oklahoma circa 1966? And they wonder why younger readers feel out of touch with newspapers. Sigh.