Complete double standard.

By now, you realize that I love Milton Bradley.  I can’t get enough of him.  The guy is the most polarizing figure in Seattle sports in a long, long time.  The more the media gives him shit, the more I love him.  But what I don’t get is how the media can have such an agenda.

When Milton sat down with ESPN’s Colleen Dominguez earlier this week, she was talking to him like he was a child, and attempting to coax answers out of him.  He wasn’t trying to throw the Cubs under the bus at all, and she kept speculating and re-asking the same questions over and over until she got the sound byte she wanted.  Of course when you read a quote from that interview, it makes Milton come off as crazy, and suspecting the Cubs of sending him hate mail.  But when you actually watch the interview, he is doing a very good job — much better than I could do — of not being a dick to her.  At that point, I would have said “Listen lady, I know you have a job to do, but if I give you an answer, don’t try to twist it and make it seem like I’m giving your version of the answer.”

I tried posting the video on here, but ESPN removed the video from YouTube.  So, yeah.  You’ll have to go here to watch it.

Anyway, ripping Dominguez for the interview was only half of why I wrote this post.  Sometime last week, Angels CF Torii Hunter was quoted as saying “Latino’s aren’t black.”  While this is actually true, he received a little bit of negative publicity for it, but not much.  This joke of a story by the AP even goes as far as saying “Hunter has long been known as one of baseball’s sincere, good guys.”

Really?  So he gets a pass because he’s one of baseball’s “good guys”?  Amazing.  If Milton Bradley said that Latino’s are imposters and that they weren’t black — which is the word Hunter used — it would be on the front page of ESPN and all over the national media.  Bradley would be blasted for being racist or reverse racist (which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  How can you be reverse racist?  Isn’t it still just racist?) and everyone would be saying ‘here we go again’ with Bradley.

The media is completely irresponsible and hypocritical.  They demand respect without giving any and demand equality when they give none themselves.  They have their own agendas to pursue, helping the average fair-weather fan decide who is suitable to like and who they should dislike.  And it’s all bullshit.

If you’re going to rip Milton Bradley, fine.  But then you need to rip Torii Hunter, too.  Be consistent.  Don’t have a tiny blurb about it on the baseball page of ESPN when one guy does it, and then wall-to-wall coverage of it when another guys does the same thing.  It’s spotty, bad journalism at best, and at worst, it’s like watching campaign ads for politicians.

The media is completely irresponsible, bias, and hypocritical.  And they should be ashamed.