Don't mess with the Chickster. Hands down, Chick Ludwig is my favorite Bengals beat writer. Even though he makes Marvin Lewis squirm, the Chickster knows his team as well as any beat writer. He's also opinionated; very opinionated -- and that's unusual for beat writers, even with blogs. He wrote late yesterday that "sifting through all the bullshit you hear and attempting to separate fact from fiction." I was slightly surprised, and saddened, while petting my 190 degrees Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee and reading through my Google Reader for this mornings stories, that the line was slightly altered to read "sifting through all the conflicting stuff you hear". C'mon Chickster. You know "Marvin's Happy Time Fun Hour" (as C Trent coins it) is a lot of bullshit, as is any press conference. Insult that a "scoop", or the potential of a "scoop", going to a Fox Sports reporter rather than the hometown village media notwithstanding. Then again, he's right. There's no real "scoop" here.
Several years ago, a rookie deal was made (not naming who, because I just can't remember). However, Len Pasquarelli reported it and I blogged at the time (some five years ago, I think), why doesn't Bengals.com break this? Unbeknownst to me, Geoff Hobson read my work, and responded explaining that news, mostly breaking news, is typically released by the agent to their favorite national-based reporter that has a wide-range of viewership or readership (aka, ESPN, FoxSports) because the information is made public before the team publishes an official press release.
Bullshit is probably the most accurate description in the English Language when it comes to Marvin's Happy Happy Time Fun Hour, and the media competition of who broke what story. I still believe that if stories are going to break, it should be locally, and not ESPN, who tends to get a high percentage of their stories wrong. Segue.
Speaking of nationally based journalists. We have to admit a feeling of sympathy for Ed Werder, who was given information about a certain Cowboys wide receiver anonymously and a week later is flat out called a liar.
"We’ve always been together," Terrell Owens said. "No matter what rumors, lies - we’ve always been together. The way everything came out - we all stuck together. We told each other we have each other’s back… The most important thing coming in here was winning this game."
Owens continues after being asked if there was a verbal confrontation between Jason Whitten and Owens. “I don’t know what y’all are talkin’ about. I don’t know what -- his sources are talking about. I mean, he’s making accusations as if he was on the practice field. So I’m clueless as to what his sources are."
PFT posts, via a Jay Glazier report, that "members of the team are calling Whitten a 'rat' and a 'snitch' behind his back". So, clue? Or rumor? Blasted anonymous sources.
So I sat against the wall of my super-comfortable couch, thinking to myself, what would Deion Sanders think. Like a blessing from the Spirit of Christmas Morning, wiggling a finger to give us a white Christmas, Deion Sanders responds. “Why would you say (Werder's) not a liar? Why would, couldn’t he be a liar? He’s over at another network fighting with two other journalists (Chris Mortensen and Michael Smith) to have a name for himself in the capacity that he is in. So the most crap that they can come up with, they get their names mentioned. He’s trying to get his name mentioned.”
Then Deion went into lovely hypocracy mode.
"It’s my obligation to the fans to tell you what I know but balance that and not allow a relationship with many players inside that locker room to really say everything I know."
So we learned here that Deion won't rip a player that he knows/likes because of "balance." Good "obligation" as an analyst, we say.
"So alot of what I’m saying isn’t hearsay, it’s known; it’s the truth."
We might have been suckered to believing this, if Deion didn't go apeshit on Werder calling him a liar for no other reason then choosing to defend Owens (read line above). Somehow we think that "fact" is a misrepresenation to a perspective. It's only factual if you lack the information necessary to make it otherwise. In other words, if I lived in a house without windows, and stepped outside one time a day at noon everyday, then I would say with honest fact that the sun never goes down.
In a sense, we understand Werder's job at ESPN. With Terrell Owen's history and ESPN's love for breaking into programming when Owens' picks his nose, when Werder gets a juicy quote, he's obligated to report it. If he doesn't, ESPN finds less value in him. If he does, then he runs the risk of feeling the ire of the NFL Network "analysts", through an anonymous source that he'll never be able to confirm or identify. Even though some question the objectionism of some nationally based reporters, journalists, we highly doubt that a guy like Ed Werder is sitting in his kitchen table, laughing deviously like Sideshow Bob saying, "I'll get you now T.O."