Michigan television stations were just as bad. They seem to have descended on Ann Arbor en masse, leaving me to wonder what real stories they were missing across the rest of our state.
However, I tend to wonder about that every day as it is. Lacking any real information, reporters opted for the famous man-or-woman-on the street interview approach. To their credit, those I saw being interviewed said mostly well-informed and nuanced things.
This may, of course, mean that those who were not experts in the fine points of Rodriguezology may have ducked into bookstores when the reporters showed up.
I wasn’t around for the fun myself, but if I had been, I would have liked to interview the same people after the Rodriguez reporters got done with them. I would have asked questions like these:
You seem to know a great deal about the University of Michigan’s football program. Did you know that the football coach makes about three times as much as President Mary Sue Coleman?
Do you think that’s appropriate? Incidentally, he is also sort of a state employee, and makes about fifteen times as much as the governor? What do you think about that?
To me, the answers to those questions might have been more interesting than the endless speculation about who the next coach might be. But if I had felt really masochistic, I would have asked these questions as well: Do you know who your state senator is?
How about your state representative? Did you know the state has an approaching budget deficit that is about seven hundred times bigger than the football coach‘s salary? Did you know we have to eliminate that deficit by the end of September?
I’ll bet I would have gotten some blank horrified stares. Then I might have asked, do you think we should raise tuition and fees at all our universities to plug some of that gap?
Do you think we should jack up the income tax instead? Or extend the sales tax to services, paying taxes on changing the brakes on your car, for example.
Don’t like that idea? Okay, how about closing the prisons and letting everybody out.
That would just about eliminate the deficit. Sound crazy? Well, yes. But the law says they have to plug that deficit somehow. We could save some money if we really shortchange the public schools.
But how would that enable Michigan to compete for the high-tech jobs of the twenty-first century? These are hard and difficult questions. They aren’t as fun as speculating whether this new coach or that new coach might turn University of Michigan football around.
To me, however, trying to save our state is more interesting, and certainly much more important. I’m not putting down sports, or our need for occasional escape. But we in the media have to do a better job of making the truly significant interesting.
Otherwise, someday, there may not even be enough money left to pay the next football coach.
Dear Jack,
Yes, it is all a bit embarassing; the level of public punditry about major-college football coaching, and the level of public ignorance about our state legislature. You're right about all of that.
But the University of Michigan's Head Football Coach is paid by the self-sustaining Michigan Athletic Department. There are zero tax dollars/general fund monies involved. No one's tax dollars pay for the Stadium, or the football coaching staff. Football money flows the other way; paying for non-revenue sports, and supplying full-paid tuition, including out-of-state tuition, et cetera, for all scholarship athletes. Anyway, you probably knew that, but it made your column sound better to gloss over that fact.
Here's the thing, Jack. People are indeed fascinated by college football, which is a brutally competitive enterprise. But which catapaults University prestige into a major money-maker for metropolitan Ann Arbor. I thought that was the sort of thing you liked. The model, as it were, for leveraging one of Michigan's universities into revenue streams, social and economic activity, local interest, national prestige, etc.
And there's this, most of all, Jack. There is a journalism meta-story in the saga of Rich Rodriguez. That meta-story is the outrageous, disgraceful way that local journalists -- and particularly three writers for the Detroit Free Press -- manipulated the Rodriguez story. Three writers -- Michael Rosenberg, Mark Snyder and Drew Sharp -- who all graduated from the University of Michigan. Now that one's a real story.
I'd propose a symposium, somewhere on the University of Michigan campus; to explore, as a case study in journalism ethics, the work of the Free Press with respect to former coach Rodriguez. There are some excellent local panel-member candidates: John U. Bacon; Brian Cook of MGoBlog.com; Frank Beckmann of WJR; Gene Meyers, Managing Sports Editor of the Free Press; Rosenberg and Snyder. And Jack Lessenberry.
If you'd like a lawyer to do the "prosecution" part of such a symposium, I'd volunteer.
Charles Brown
Michigan '80
Michigan State University College of Law '84
Posted by: Anonymous | January 05, 2011 at 04:25 PM