He should have yelled, ‘Mention the $800 million!’

TV Reporters can also
do Damage Innocently

While we who are on the side of the angels in this matter are distressed over the New York Times’s kow-towing to the Madison Square Garden monopolists, press lies, fabrications and misrepresentations do not always indicate a sinister motive.

Sometimes they’re just plain unaware.

A reporter for the usually excellent New York-1 News stated in his report today (6/21) that the controversy was over “a $1.4 billion stadium for the Jets.” That’s not a lie. Unaware is what it is, and the director should have told him in his earpiece to correct it When you’re doing a story on a financial controversy, you must make the money figures clear. This would not even have required a whole sentence, just a clause, in this case, “$800 million of which would be paid by the Jets.”

The nice fellow who was covering today’s City Council meeting didn’t say that, and so left uninformed viewers with the impression that the city would pay for the whole thing.

Any baseball fan, and I’m sure we all are, knows that if you go 1 for 7 that’s .143. This is a case of .8 billion against 1.4. Eight for 14 is 4 for 7, at least it always used to be in the old days. Four times .143 is .572 (205 points above Ty Cobb’s lifetime average!), and that is the percentage of the whole estimated bill that the Jets have promised to pay.

Reporters who are tired of saying “Eight hundred million” could say: “57.2% of which will be paid by the Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson,” and if they actually wanted to be fair, they could add, “the most personally generous sportsman ever.”

And by the way, this will be a stadium that will pay its taxes, unlike the established one with the sweetheart deal to the east of it that is trying to scream it into oblivion.

– TMcM