Small town Texas editors and reporters, get a non-football life, year 2!

I wrote about everything in the header, minus "year 2," a year ago.

If you click the link, you'll see the details of what prompted me. TLDR version? Small town Texas newspaper editors whose god is football, not school board meetings, thinking they need to make sure their own stats at games are more accurate than the team's.

Get a life.

Even more, get a life, since a staff assistant, even at small schools, now has an iPad tracking EVERY SINGLE PLAY with software that will produce a box score page complete with FULL stats. You'll ALSO get a complete drive-by-drive page, as good as college and pro games on ESPN.

Get a life!

Trump freak flag socks not flying this year at Texas small-town football

 

Last year, at Friday night football, one Friday, at a small Texas school, I saw what you see pictured at left.

Apparently, reality has set in this year. The same student is enrolled at the same school this year, out for football again, but in the last game I saw, injured or otherwise wearing a jersey shirt but not fully suited up. In that game, he was wearing shorts, as in the photo last year, but was wearing normal socks.

I am curious if other small-town newspaper reporters and editors have seen these.

On a related, semi-journalistic note? I had two Trump 2020 flags flying from balconies at two units in my apartment complex a year ago. Both stayed up until February or early March this year, when one came down. The other finally did in, I think, April. 

That said, the one that came down first has occasionally popped up again for a couple of days at a time. I'm not sure why.

Good-bye to Media Myth Alert

I liked W. Joseph Campbell when I first added him to my blogroll here and elsewhere.

But, he's become tiresome. Then worse.

The tiresome? Self-alleged, self-proclaimed media corrector Campbell loves falling back on a couple of tropes, namely, how the media get it wrong that Uncle Walter Cronkite forced LBJ out of Vietnam and how the media get it wrong about the media, not John Sirica, the Supreme Court and Congress, forcing Nixon to resign.

I'm sure there's plenty of other media myths. Campbell rarely touches them, though he has discussed early era Yellow Journalism reality and myth.

That's bad enough.

The worse?

Some of his recent posts seem to have one foot in wingnut world, or at a minimum, one foot in fellow traveler world.

His post about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which he chides USA Today for calling Afghanistan Biden's Katrina, with Campbell then saying it's much worse, is the last straw.

Campbell can't be bothered to mention that Trump negotiated the withdrawal, Trump met with the Taliban for these negotiations, Trump set the withdrawal date, then Trump accelerated the originally planned pace of US troops withdrawing.

Unions at Texas papers: an update

Newsrooms at the Dallas Snooze, Fort Worth Startlegram and Austin Stateless all opted sometime back to join the News Guild and fight for unionization. Surprisingly to a degree on first read, by its past history, but really, not, negotiations are going best at the one-pony Snooze, versus Craphouse/New Gannett in Austin and McClatchy/hedge fund in Cowtown, reports Gus Bova.

The Snooze may figure, with the former Belo owning only it and its limping offspring like Al Dia, that it's got nothing to win by pissing off remaining staff as it continues to work to become 21st century digital first after multiple past failures on that front.

McClatchy, for all its good stuff on not following other major chains on all foreign policy reporting, appears to have been a bit red-ass on labor stuff even before the hedge takeover. Craphouse (Gatehouse), the real driver of "New Gannett," is notorious as a crappy workplace, so no surprise there.