News Unfiltered
July 12, 2017
During the first summer after my college graduation, I was the campaign advance man outside of the Milwaukee and Madison areas for a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. A great job.
Sometime during that summer, I met the head of the campaign in a café. He was reading a newspaper as I arrived; and as I sat down at the table, I asked him what he was reading. I’ll always remember his response. He said, “I’m looking for what could go wrong today?”
It was the campaign manager’s job to think about worst-case scenarios and consider how the campaign might get taken off message by the news of the day.
I was young and impressionable, and I soon began to consume the daily news through the same filter.
It was not difficult to do so in the 1970s. The daily newspaper was printed and delivered to my door every day. Television had just three networks, and each provided brief news reports two or three times a day.
Today, what passes as news comes from hundreds or thousands or millions of sources and it is changing constantly, 24/7/365. Only a small portion of those sources is professionally operated with accountability for the substance and/or style of the so-called reporting.
Today it drives me nuts to consume news – that is, to really think about what I’m reading or hearing the way I did in the 1970s. Today, meaningful matters often get buried in trivia while the most inane and inaccurate stories and comments can go viral overnight.
I’ve always said you can get too much of a good thing – too much food; too much free time; and certainly, too much sports. And clearly, we have too much “news” about sports.
Beyond Fairness
April 11, 2017
One of the lessons I learned decades ago when I was employed at the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) is that sometimes the playing rules are not fair.
The NFHS is the publisher of playing rules for most high school sports, and its rule books govern competition for most of the contests for most of the high schools in the U.S.
But the NFHS doesn’t publish the most fair rules. On purpose.
The rules for the high school level attempt to do much more than promote competitive equity, or a balance between offense and defense; they also attempt – without compromising participant health and safety – to simplify the administration of the game.
Unlike Major League Baseball, where umpires officiate full-time, and professional basketball, football and ice hockey where they officiate nearly full-time, the officials at the high school level are part-timers. They have other jobs. This is their avocation, not their vocation.
So the NFHS develops and publishes rules that minimize exceptions to the rules. In football, for example, there are fewer variables for determining the spot where penalties are enforced.
At the high school level, the rule makers intend that the rules be – for players, coaches and officials alike – quicker to learn, simpler to remember, and easier to apply during the heat of contests.