Cranky This Morning

     A few words about the media's coverage of Manny Pacquiao.  In no other sport are the game time victories of that particular sport's top athlete(s) covered in conjunction with their off field accomplishments.  The very thought of doing so is absurd.  Imagine if every time Kobe and The Lakers won a game, in addition to summarizing the lay ups and assists, the writer also described the success of each players' stock portfolio?  Ludicrous.  It just wouldn't happen.  Yet every time Manny Pacquiao wins a fight, the ensuing articles and broadcast stories give a superficial, almost dismissive recap of his jabs and left hooks, before brushing all of that aside and going into elaborate detail about his political success in the Philippines.  This is endemic of the main stream media's arrogance and elitism. 
     Let me stop there for a moment.  I understand that last line is a pat sound byte of right wing lunacy.  Conservative commentators have made major news organizations villains in their fanciful tales told to propagate false consciousness in the working class.  That's not what I'm doing.  I understand George Soros hasn't instructed hack sports journalists to write lousy articles about Manny Pacquiao as part of a communist plot to subvert our precious bodily fluids.  What I am saying however is that the spoiled, never-had-to-work-an-honest-day-in-their-lives, Ivy League MA in Journalism news editors who oversee these stories find prize fighting to be an affront to their sophisticated sensibilities.  If it was up to them they would ignore the sport entirely.  Why don't they?  Because they answer to bosses, who answer to bosses, who work for the CEOs who run news organizations' parent companies which earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year from domestic and international boxing pay per view buys, and do so because contrary to these news editors' snobbish biases, boxing is a highly strategic, extremely cerebral living chess match, requiring levels of physical superiority and mental acuity as stringent,  if not more so, than any other form of competition known to mankind.  So when this sport's most talented figure and prolific money earner fights, news editors have to make room to cover it.  
     But they don't have to be happy about it.  Their constant mentioning of Pacquiao's election to the Philippine House of Representatives is nothing more than juvenile passive-aggression with which they feel they are somehow distancing  themselves from boxing's distasteful presence.  "Yes Pacquiao threw some punches in the brutal human cock-fight his poverty marred childhood forced him into, but that ugliness is just a means to a more noble end.  He is after all a congressman in his beloved homeland.  Isn't that splendid?"  This condescending arrogance is an unmitigated assault on the sport of boxing and its millions of followers.  Every American, fight fan or otherwise, should be appalled.  Have a nice Sunday everybody.