"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
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TV sports personality Jenn Sterger says NFL quarterback Brett Favre sent her cell-phone photos of himself masturbating in 2008, according to a report at the blog Deadspin.
The startling allegations about Favre — a married father of two whose first grandchild was born in April — have threatened to overshadow recent reports that the 11-time Pro Bowl quarterback is finally ready to retire at age 40.
Sterger, a 27-year-old former Florida State University cheerleader who parlayed her surgically enhanced figure into a career as a sports commentator, was hired in 2008 as a host for the New York Jets’ “Gameday” pre-game TV program. She appeared in Maxim and Playboy and wrote a Sports Illustrated column.
According to Deadspin’s A.J. Dauleiro, Sterger said “Favre first began to call her early in the season and leave strange, friendly messages on her voicemail.” While the messages were at first merely friendly, Favre’s calls later “started to turn weird . . . flirty and strange,” Daulerio wrote in a report published Thursday at Deadspin, a sports site that is part of the Gawker Media network.
“Sterger claimed she spurned Favre’s advances because he was married, but also because she was working for the Jets at the time she didn’t think it was the best idea to start a torrid affair with the team’s highest profile player,” Daulerio reported, and Sterger didn’t want to complain for fear “she might lose her job.” Eventually, however, Favre began sending her pornographic photos of himself:
But then, one night, Sterger received a picture on her phone which was so shocking that she just tossed it across the room. It was his [penis]. Brett Favre’s [penis]. And it happened multiple times. In fact, Sterger claims that, in one of the photos Favre allegedly sent her, he’s masturbating — while wearing a pair of Crocs. In another photo, Favre is holding his penis while wearing the wristwatch he wore during his first teary-eyed retirement press conference.
Daulerio said Sterger was reluctant to be named in the Deadspin report but wanted “to expose this dude for the creepy douche he is.” In an e-mail to Daulerio, Sterger wrote: “I just want to make it clear I never met him, saw him, etc. . . . because I don’t roll that way. That way meaning old . . . or married. Some big boobed hoes have morals and souls believe it or not.”
As Green Bay’s starting quarterback for 16 seasons, Favre led the Packers to victory in Super Bowl XXXI. He holds many NFL records, including most most career touchdown passes and most career passing yards. His personal life has been marred by several tragedies. In 2003, Favre started a Monday night game against the Oakland Raiders the day after his father died, and threw for nearly 400 yards in a 41-7 victory. In 1996, he was treated for addiction to prescription painkillers. In 2004, his brother-in-law was killed in an accident and his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
* * * * * *
I wrote that in straight-news style because Deadspin’s A.J. Daulerio writes like a damned blogger. Excuse me for using that as a pejorative expression, but this is becoming a problem that needs to be addressed.
OK, when you’re just snarking on the headlines — stuff previously reported by regular news organizations — you can write any way you please and nobody cares. However, when you are doing first-source original reporting, or aggregating news in a way that aspires to be taken seriously, it is important to write clearly and concisely.
The straight-faced Joe Friday “just-the-facts-ma’am” style of writing works because it conveys authority. If the story is truly newsworthy and you’ve got your facts nailed down cold, there’s no need to tart it up and make it clever or sensational. There was certainly no need for Daulerio to write this kind of story with the gossipy Perez Hilton-style lede he used:
Here’s another reason Brett Favre should stay retired this time: Turns out The Daily Line’s Jenn Sterger has kept a ridiculously disturbing (but HILARIOUS) secret about her interactions with The Gunslinger while they were both part of the Jets organization.
If it is a serious story — and these kind of accusations against a married sports star certainly are serious — then it deserves to be reported in a serious way. Dial down the snark, avoid loaded labels and sensationalism, and try to play it straight.
Knowing that my friends in the blogosphere may resent this advice, I’ll add that this is an argument I often had as a desk editor working with professional news reporters who, when they got a really juicy scoop, would yield to similar temptation. Despite having garnered a reputation as an ideological hatchet-man during my decade at The Washington Times, there were actually several times when I’d be the guy taking out loaded phrases (“left-wing,” etc.) from news stories. The bigger the story, the more important it is to report it with that objective Joe Friday style.
Blogging is a form of journalism and, at its best, blogging can have as much credibility and impact as the New York Times. There’s no reason why bloggers should limit their effectiveness by always writing in “snarktastic” mode. You’ll notice, for example, that Dan Riehl uses a different style of writing when he’s doing actual reporting than when he’s just linking and commenting.
Having worn many hats over the course of a quarter-century — music critic, news reporter, sports editor, columnist, feature writer, news editor, blogger — I have never felt that versatility was a detriment in journalism. The emerging reality of the New Media environment, where downsized news organization are working with smaller staffs and waging a 24/7 competition for “eyes” involving every SOB with a Blogspot site, makes versatility more crucial than ever.
The ability to switch from opinionated snark-slinger to Mr. Neutral Objectivity on a moment’s notice will, I predict, become recognized as a necessary skill in 21st-century journalism. And I also predict that Brett Favre will become sports columnist for The American Prospect.
UPDATE: If Dave Weigel’s comment section is like sex, maybe Jenn Sterger and Brett Favre belong there.
UPDATE II: Another temptation to be resisted: The idea that you have a snarktastic monopoly on saying everything funny or clever. In this case, I must defer to Doug Powers and Cubachi:
UPDATE III: Professor Donald Douglas at American Power scores big: First, as befitting Rule 5 Sunday, he’s got video of Jenn Sterger’s Maxim photo shoot and, second, he reminds us that A.J. Dauleiro was the guy who first linked the notorious Erin Andrews peephole video.
Professor Douglas also notes that CBS News is now reporting the Sterger-Favre scandal. Given that this is opening day of NFL pre-season, I can’t believe the Ace of Spades HQ crew has missed this story, but I didn’t see it on a quick scan.
UPDATE IV: “I can see the court testimony now . . . ‘Yer honor, that’s not mine!’ ‘Prove it Mr. Favre.’ “
UPDATE V: Linked at The Lonely Conservative.
UPDATE VI: “And all because he wanted an excuse to post a pseudo-naked picture of the Seminole-cheering eye-candy turned Playboy-model sideline reporter” — obviously, Troglopundit doesn’t appreciate Neutral Objective Journalism.
UPDATE VII: Welcome, Riehl World View readers! And Dan Collins blames it all on Favre’s abandonment of cheese.
by Smitty
Rule 5 Sunday dawns again. We look in the Rule 5 label and see what sort of delights await.
I think Kimberly Freeman of One Eyed Doll has some real talent. Thanks, GSGF!
Apropos nothing:
And now for a bit of beauty sleep for your humble aggregator. Stay awesome, and don’t forget Ten Buck Fridays!
You remember Antoine Dodson, whose comments on an attempted rape in a Huntsville, Alabama, housing project became a viral YouTube sensation? Yeah. Well, Andy Carvin NPR is taking this phenomenon seriously:
But is this Internet meme really about race, music, comedy, celebrity or a delicate mix of all of the above? And for Antoine Dodson, how would he respond to his new-found fame?
WAFF-TV received angry calls and e-mails from members of the public who felt the story perpetuated stereotypes about African Americans.
Right, and Yosemite Bear’s “Double Rainbow” perpetuated stereotypes about California hippies. Saturday evening, our 21-year-old (recently married) daughter Kennedy dropped by the house. Turns out, she knows all the words to the “Bed Intruder Song,” which has become such a big hit you can even get an Antoine Dodson ringtone:
Antoine Dodson now has a Web site and is seeking donations so he can get out of the projects, because hey rapin’ everybody out here!
by Smitty
Virginia Virtucon notes:
David Jones of the UK Daily Mail wrote an article that shows how the combination of Mother Nature’s resiliency and BP’s strong clean-up efforts have almost completely mitigated what the White House, the mainstream media, and the environmental lobby would have you believe to be a horrible, generations-lasting disaster of epic, near-biblical proportions.
How do we transfer that marvelous efficiency to the most expensive political disaster in human history, Progressivism?
Mentoring the next generation of conservative leadership is a serious obligation, and we Jedi masters are thus occasionally called upon to instruct young padwans in the ways of the Force. Readers will recall that I spent Friday afternoon covering the National Conservative Student Conference hosted by the Young America’s Foundation. The conference was followed by a reception and dinner banquet at D.C.’s luxurious Ritz-Carlton Hotel:
Fred Thompson was thronged by young Fred Heads among the rising generation of conservative activists at the YAF reception. While I hate to break my “don’t hassle the celebrities” rule, I did impose on Senator Thompson for a minute to make mention of the Christine O’Donnell Senate campaign in Delaware.
George Allen joins fellow YAF supporters at the gala dinner.
OK, guys, don’t get all “hubba hubba” here. YAF’s Kiana Dunn is only 18, and just recently graduated escaped from high school youth indoctrination camp in California. The reason I took the photo was to remember her name. Why? Because she told me she will be a freshman this fall at a college just 10 miles from Bruce Springsteen’s home in New Jersey and yet, sad to say, she doesn’t even know the lyrics of “Born to Run.” As a matter of cultural preservation, I expect the Sarah T. Herman Intern Scholar to commit these immortal lyrics to memory.
While I would have liked to stay for dinner with the YAF crew at the Ritz-Carlton, the highways were jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, and my mentoring efforts were needed elsewhere — at the Rocket Bar in Chinatown, to be exact. It was there that Newsbusters was hosting the monthly “First Friday” event, where girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard. So I had to ride through mansions of glory in my suicide machine to 714 7th Street.
For some reason, seeing Brent Bozell III in a Newbusters T-shirt reminds me of how this town rips the bones from your back.
Joe Marier appears on the right side of this photo, but considering that he writes for Frum Forum . . . well, I’m mentoring him in hopes that together we could break this trap.
Moments before this photos was taken, all these guys solemnly pledged to Iris Somberg, “We want to guard your dreams and visions.”
You’re probably wondering why Crabby Con is not only wearing the famous fedora but also, quite obviously, seated in the back of the famous 2004 KIA Optima. Trust me, there is a perfectly innocent explanation for this, but to get that explantion, you’ll have to come back in about an hour for the next update. I’ll have more photos, which I promise to post with all the madness in my soul.
UPDATE: As promised, perfectly innocent:
You see, Crabby Con was there to see Yates Walker, who is just a scared and lonely rider and has gotta find out how it feels.
I’m pretty sure this is one of those guys who was sprung from cages out on Highway 9.
Two of his fellow Cornell alumni joined Daily Caller deputy editor Jamie Weinstein in an everlasting kiss.
One Fine Jay and Lachlan Markay are gonna get to that place where we really want to go. More photos in the next update.
UPDATE II: Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide:
Matt Sheffield, Mrs. Sheffield, Kevin Mooney and Mary Beth Hutchins sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.
Neither Chris Moody nor Lachlan Markay is gay, even though they look like they may want to be huddled on the beach in a mist.
Iris Somberg and Laura Lieberman briefly considered accepting my invitation to walk with me out on the wire, but wisely decided against it.
Yates Walker and Matthew Vadum are chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin’ out over the line.
Matthew Vadum poses with Crabby Con, who is waiting for her ginormous Larry King glasses to come back in style, but ’til then tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.
The most absurd episode of Blame Bush Syndrome evah!
“George Bush, in the middle of a war, had an all-station news conference to announce how horrible it was for the safety of America that gay people were getting married in San Francisco, which pissed me off enough to get on a plane and go get married . . . It was like an act of . . . defiance . . . If you’re gonna count up everybody who you think is not of value and round ’em all up and slap a pink triangle on ’em.”
You see that O’Donnell has bought into the Bush-as-Hitler analogy so deeply that she deploys it automatically, unthinkingly, with this divisive “pink triangle” nonsense. Furthermore, like many of those on the Left, Rosie is so accustomed to getting her news filtered through biased venues, that she “remembers” things that never happened.
Tim Graham fact-checks Rosie’s bogus history, pointing out that there was no “all-station news conference” and that Bush’s 2004 statement was actually a very thoughtful and measured expression of the conservative position on marriage.
It’s sad, but not really surprising, to think that Rosie’s San Francisco wedding with Kelli Carpenter was merely a political publicity stunt — which is what Rosie means when she misuses the phrase “civil disobedience.” We could scarcely expect any union solemnized under such a pretext to endure, and the dissolution of the O’Donnell-Carpenter romance was one of those “second time as farce” episodes:
Rosie was talking about her long-haired chihuahua Misty with pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick . . . And she then revealed further, “What happened [was] when Kelli moved out two years ago, I got the dog. Because I wanted another child or something to love. And I got the dog.”
“I got the dog,” indeed! Speaking of marriage and children, pro-life blogger Jill Stanek notes how Judge Walker’s decision in San Francisco v. Schwarzenegger is being likened to Roe v. Wade.
Further commenting on the undemocratic nature of Judge Walker’s ruling, Melissa Clouthier of Liberty Pundits expects that “the disenfranchised masses will add this to the list of ways that the government treats them as worthless dung.”
That sentiment ought to be repaid with interest Nov. 2.
UPDATE: Dan Riehl calls attention to the news that Ann Coulter will address an event being billed as “Homocon.” NTTAWWT.
by Smitty
Long-time friend of this blog Da Tech Guy was in the neighborhood and discovered what quite a few say about Moslems. Individually, they’re the kind of social conservatives that a goodly chunk of the readers of this blog have no trouble getting along with.
For example, at CPAC two years back, I spent a bit of time talking to Muslims for America.
On the other hand, I just finished The Grand Jihad, and I’m halfway through Nomad. There are several darkly quotable passages in both.
Thoughts: