The Bay Area Sports Press and the Raiders: Where Ethics Go To Die

First and foremost, I’m not an Al Davis apologist. I respect the man for the positives he’s brought to the NFL.

The late Bill Walsh counted Al Davis among his closest friends. They rank as two great football minds that would have you wishing you were a fly on the wall when they discussed the game.

While the press painted one as a god in the NFL, the other has been vilified as a pariah. It’s been widely reported in the local press in northern California’s Bay Area that Al Davis is teetering on the brink of insanity.

Of course, if they were talking about the ownership of the 49ers or Walsh, the press would be more inclined to print that they were what I like to call, “synaptically disengaged.”

But this is the Bay Area press we're talking about today, kiddies. A group that, when Al Davis and the Raiders are their target, shoot straight from the hip and aren’t too concerned with collateral damage. They’re akin to the modern-day version of the Keystone Cops.

First, let me offer my sincerest apologies to those writers whose ethics continue to be beyond reproach. Lumping them together with anti-Raiders crowd does them a deep disservice.

So to Jerry McDonald, Jason Jones, Phil Barber, and the rest, I offer my condolences for the quagmire of muddy reporting that you wade through on a daily basis to get yourselves heard.

I grew up reading Jim Murray in Los Angeles. Mr. Murray was the Michelangelo of American sports writers. He created masterpieces with his words, and above all else, he did so with dignity and journalistic ethics.

These days, the best you could say about Ostler, Gay, Dickey, Cohen, et al, is that they are the Monets of sports writers. They look good from afar, but up close, they‘re a mess. Their adolescent glee in writing their tall tales is comparable to painting with crayons.

They’ve been entrusted by the public to inform, entertain, and opine. The catch is the word "trust," indicates that they do so with at least a modicum of integrity.

But where Al Davis and the Raiders are concerned, they’ve willfully bypassed the key ingredient necessary to bake this particular cake. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there who are so busy washing down their slice with Kool Aid that they don’t taste the bitterness.

To quote Scott “Scooter“ Oslter, “What I hear from a lot of fans sounds like disgust and outrage. They can't believe the way Davis is jacking around his kid coach, courting catastrophe.”

Um, Scooter, the "disgust and outrage" was a direct result of the reckless reporting by you and your mediots. Some people are willing to believe anything they hear. Hey, Bush got elected twice didn’t he?

Kiffin said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire," and there is no doubt that there was some dissension in Oakland at the end of the season. The fact that the Raiders aren’t a team to air their dirty laundry in public has apparently given the hacks out there the green light to embellish things to their little heart's content, forever citing “a source close to the Raiders.”

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