Full-Court Press
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November 16, 2012 10:40 AM
ESPN’s unreality-based coverage
Karl Rove's got nothing on the boys from Bristol
One of the main takeaways from last week’s election was that conservatives were living in a bubble of delusion, convinced right up until the returns started coming in that Mitt Romney would swamp President Obama in the electoral college. The candidate himself was said to be gobsmacked that he lost, and so decisively. This detachment from reality was mainly the...
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October 26, 2012 11:45 AM
Cancer made Lance Armstrong hard to hate
It also made it easy for sports writers to ignore those pesky doping allegations
The final ace was pulled from Lance Armstrong’s house of cards Monday when the International Cycling Union (UCI) stripped Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles—the victories that had ensured his fame, allowed his Livestrong charity to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, and cemented Armstrong’s status as the greatest rider of all time. Now those Tours...
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October 12, 2012 07:00 AM
Hey coach, lighten up!
Steve Spurrier and his coaching cohorts get pissy with the press
Steve Spurrier, the wisecrackin’ ol’ ballcoach at the University of South Carolina, has the Gamecocks in rarefied air. After demolishing Georgia last weekend, a team that traditionally stomped Carolina, Spurrier’s squad is undefeated and ranked third in the nation. A huge game looms Saturday, when South Carolina visits LSU, last year’s national runner up, in Baton Rouge.
But with...
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September 21, 2012 07:10 AM
The future of NFL Films looks bleak
With Steve Sabol's untimely death, there's no one to protect what he built from the cheapskates at NFL Network
Steve Sabol died on Tuesday from brain cancer at age 69. The president of, and artistic sensibility behind, NFL Films since the late 1960s, Sabol essentially created the myth and glamour of the modern National Football League, through the use of cinematography, music, wireless microphones, humor, poetry, and an innate belief that every football game was 60 minutes of savage...
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September 18, 2012 10:58 AM
Take one for the team
Football season is upon us, and so are its tried and true clichés
There is so much to love about football’s 24/7 ubiquity on television, but there is one (and only one) downside: the toxic exposure to clichés from the litany of former players and puny communications majors who analyze the game.
I’m not talking about “taking it one game at a time” or “it is what it is,” the crimes against...
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September 4, 2012 12:26 AM
Local television and the Dodgers-Red Sox trade
Are the Dodgers loading up on stars in advance of a new local TV deal?
The words “local television” conjure images of infomercials, Seinfeld reruns, and lame repartee on cheesy newscasts, infomercials. But local television is also critically important in today’s baseball world, as further proven late last month when the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for the hefty contracts of Boston Red Sox underachievers and malcontents Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett. The stunning...
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August 13, 2012 02:56 PM
Drugs and the Olympics
What if reporters imbedded with athletes during training?
The first week of the Olympics is traditionally given over to complaints about NBC’s coverage, as we discussed last week. By the second week, the quadrennial controversy shifts to speculation about the use of illegal drugs by the winners.
This time around, attention focused on two athletes: Jamaican superstar Usain Bolt, who treats the sprints like a Sunday jog...
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August 6, 2012 11:11 AM
ESPN’s Tim Tebow lovefest
Shut out of the Olympics, the 'Worldwide Leader In Sports' puts NFL front and center
US sports coverage last week was split neatly into two distinct, Jungian halves, represented by those sportscasting sweethearts, married couple Dan Hicks and Hannah Storm. Hicks works for NBC, and called the swimming competition at the London Olympics. His enthusiastic descriptions of Michael Phelps and Missy Franklin winning gold appeared only on tape delay during prime time, a four-hour show...
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July 25, 2012 02:35 PM
Sacred cows
The Penn State story offers a glimpse of the problems with league- and team-owned broadcast operations
Full-Court Press is a periodic column about the coverage of sports.
On July 12, a report prepared by former FBI Director Louis Freeh at the behest of Penn State University slammed the school for covering up former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual predation of children, and demolished Joe Paterno’s reputation in the process. Freeh delivered the crux of his...
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May 26, 2009 04:35 PM
Kaiser Heads to Hillman Foundation
Here's a complete archive of his CJR columns
Charles Kaiser's Full Court Press column has moved to the Web site of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. This is a complete archive of the FCP columns that Kaiser wrote for CJR.
May 2009
05/22/09: Tortured Logic, “Dueling Speeches” Edition - Media overplay, under-analyze yesterday’s torture arguments
05/13/09: “Good Deeds, and Good Works” - In memoriam: Eden Ross Lipson
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May 22, 2009 05:44 PM
Tortured Logic, “Dueling Speeches” Edition
Media overplay, under-analyze yesterday's torture arguments
“Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens fell silent. In other words we went off course.”–President Barack Obama “I want to say I was always on Darth Vader’s side.”--Bill Kristol “That’s kind of a weird thing to admit.”--Jon Stewart
Barack Obama’s speech about terrorists combined a ringing reaffirmation of American constitutional values with a disappointing willingness to repeat some...
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May 13, 2009 03:11 PM
“Good Deeds, and Good Works”
In memoriam: Eden Ross Lipson
Eden Ross Lipson, an author-editor-activist-journalist who had a huge, mostly-unseen impact on American literature and American life, died early yesterday morning at a hospice in Manhattan. Her death at 66 came thirty months after she was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer--and twenty-nine months after she nearly succumbed to septic shock during one of the first hospital visits she made in her...
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May 8, 2009 05:23 PM
Winners and Sinners
Kaiser on Ifill, Bumiller, Sulzberger, and more
Winners: New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt and President Barack Obama for a splendidly substantive interview in The New York Times Magazine about the democratization of finance, the future of education and health care, and what the economy might look like “on the other side of the so-called Great Recession.” FCP is always astonished by the unusual experience of...
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May 7, 2009 06:05 PM
Above the Fold: The Pentagon Capers
The mainstream media are silent on the Pentagon’s repudiation of its own report
This week the Pentagon took the highly unusual step of withdrawing a report issued by its inspector general one week before President George W. Bush left office last January. The report was an attack on the superb New York Times stories, written by David Barstow, the first about how the Pentagon had recruited an army of seventy-five retired military-officer talking...
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