Media Bias and Aaron Rodgers
Covid drama around Packers quarterback brings out the worst in corporate media group think
Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers quarterback, will not be on the field Sunday when the Packers play the Kansas City Chiefs.
The news is a blow to NFL fans eagerly anticipating a matchup pitting the veteran Rodgers against Young Gun Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs’ likable MVP quarterback, corporate pitchman and new face of professional football.
Rodgers is not injured. In fact, like most people who test positive for COVID-19, he’s quite healthy and asymptomatic. League protocols are preventing Rodgers from playing Sunday after his positive test was revealed Wednesday. Rodgers give the Packers the best chance to win and guarantees high ratings for television partners. That’s the only real casualty here, that he can’t play football for a week. But we wouldn’t know that by the reaction to Rodgers’ circumstance by corporate media.
Much of the feverishly judgmental reaction from the media establishment to Rodgers’ Covid-induced isolation has nothing to do with football.
It had everything to do with resentment and fear.
The beating heart of sportswriting is story telling. Profiling an athlete; making an individual interesting to the reader through the lens of a writer. To do it well, good writing requires patience, talent and curiosity.
The more interesting the subject, the better for the writer and ultimately, the more satisfying experience for the audience. But Covid made sportswriters forget that core covenant from writer to reader.
There was something about this pesky virus that made sportswriters insecure about their own place in the world, and they latched on to Covid Mania, becoming willing advocates for shut downs of the very thing that they were paid to do –– cover sports. The psychology is fascinating as it was the equivalent of a trial lawyer lobbying for more restrictive laws on damages awarded to clients or a union boss arguing against cost of living raises for the rank and file (imagine that!)
Here’s how the Aaron Rodgers drama ties back.
There is no more interesting figure in sports than Rodgers.
On the field, he replaced a Hall of Fame quarterback loved by fans (Brett Fave) and did what rarely happens in generational transitions –– he won a Super Bowl and kept winning. Away from football, Rodgers dated actresses and picked grudges with family members. Fans in Green Bay revere Rodgers’ football skills but don’t necessarily understand him as a person. They never cared as long as the wins kept coming.
This kind of fluid, dysfunctional dynamic is catnip for sportswriters. Who wouldn’t want to tackle the narrative of trying to explain Rodgers, a deeply sensitive yet brilliant athlete, to one of the most engaged professional fan bases in the country?
Then Covid happened, the NFL put it’s policies in place and Rodgers did as Rodgers does –– he went against the grain.
Like most of his teammates, he could’ve just gotten the vaccine jab and comply with league-ordered protocols. But Rodgers chose a different route.
No one paid much attention to what Rodgers meant by “immunized” until Wednesday. That’s when the news hit that he tested positive for COVID-19 and because the league considers Rodgers unvaccinated, he must isolate for 10 days, per NFL protocols, and ruled out for Sunday’s game.
Rather than research the meaning of “immunized” from a public health context and do actual reporting on what Rodgers had done, sportswriters pounced on the chance lecture America on the appropriateness of what drug an individual should put in their own body and didn’t hesitate to ridicule Rodgers, opinion-based take downs personal in tone and context.
The last tweeter said Rodgers is not a ‘role model’ and should be ‘let go.’
Are you f-ing kidding me? Note to any parent or youth coach holding Rodgers up as a role model –– don’t do it. Professional athletes are mercenaries, not life tutors.
One sportswriter for ESPN actually wrote that we should “first and foremost be concerned about Rodgers’ health and safety.”
For playing professional football? Yes. There’s a risk for every player each time they take the field to play a violent game. As for Covid? Rodgers is in more danger from drowning in the team’s therapy whirlpool than from any sickness he may catch stemming from the virus.
It’s all silly virtue-signaling from corporate media cudgels who can’t help but tell us how we should feel about Rodgers’ plight.
So why all the self-righteousness posturing from sportswriters and other blue check Covid Cultists? Where is all the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou priggish moralizing coming from?
Because they resent Rodgers. They don’t like the fact he made his own choice for his own reasons. That he didn’t toe the line. They don’t like his iconoclastic lifestyle, a lifestyle pre-Covid that made for great feature writing copy. Now, in November 2021, his dissenting actions are perceived as a threat. A threat to the public stances they’ve taken on Covid, reverberated through the Twitter echo chamber, positions grounded –– and rewarded –– in emotion, not facts.
That regularly re-casted position, sanctioned by Big Tech, is this –– people who do not go along with public health mandates and protocols are bad human beings and should be punished. These are professionals, after all, who set these guidelines and we must respect and rubber stamp the opinions of doctors, specialists and politicians who are elected to serve and protect.
Rodgers’ fame makes him an easy target for the sermonizers.
Unless of course, that famous person is part of the protected class. Then they get a pass. As a white male, any misdeeds by Rodgers are instantly shot through the Identity Politics Content Industrial Complex.
If Patrick Mahomes were caught in the same situation?
My guess is the moral outrage would be diminished to “NFL/team wasn’t clear enough about the rules…he’s a young kid…chalk it up to a life lesson” type narrative.
Sportswriters are good people. I know a lot of them. I was one, still am.
But Covid did something to their psyche that may be irreversible. They are more derisive, snooty and devoutly pious to a view of the world I don’t share. Give me the facts, Jack. I’m not interested in your feelings.
Aaron Rodgers reminds them of the person they are now. And that scares the living shit out of them.
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