in power, whether government or private business or the head of the family, tend to watch out for their self-interests by telling us only what they want us to know. Nothing wrong with that from their perspective. It's their job.
It's just that as consumers and/or citizens, we're entitled to more. Parcells and Jones are entitled to tell you as little as they can get away with. You, as a consumer of products like their sponsors and their tickets, are entitled to information, as much as we can get. That's where the media comes in.
And that's why it is absolutely incumbent on the media to be above reproach. We are the ones who are supposed to tell you what's really is happening, not what the people in power want you to know. How can the system work at all if we are either too lazy to tell the whole story or too dishonest to change what we report if it's not what we want to report? Sadly, there is truth in the old joking journalistic adage, "Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story."
Some of this happened in the Terrell Owens reporting in the last month. Answers to questions from a Monday were put on the questions from Wednesday, because it fit the story better. If you didn't know what to believe, you wouldn't know what to believe.
Someday Jones and Parcells will part ways. Maybe it will be amicably, when Bill rides into the sunset. Maybe it will be acrimonious, when one of them just gets sick of the way things are going. But the fact right now is that they're not fighting over this. Maybe they have different ideas, but they're not fighting. And any attempt to tell you otherwise is one of two dangerous things: It's either very lazy, sloppy reporting or it's intentionally dishonest.
I'm going to pick lazy and sloppy, because I do not wish to believe that someone with so much influence in this profession I hold dear would intentionally manipulate the facts simply because they could and wanted to.
What we should be reporting is what Jones said Wednesday in comments taped to run on the NFL Network. Asked if the change was due to the play of Bledsoe or because this particular change combined with the rest of the Cowboys' personnel on offense gave the team the best chance to win right now, he quickly responded, "I think you've nailed it right there."
The public may not always like the media, but usually you trust us because you have little other choice about getting information.
It's really, really bad when we let you down like we did this week.
