Tiger Woods

Wednesday's NBC Today featured a full report on Tiger Woods praising President Obama's golf game, with White House correspondent Peter Alexander cheering the weekend outing as the "most talked about golf pairing in years" and that Woods "was to golf what the President wants to be to politics, the guy who can't stop winning." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

In between clips of Woods, Alexander proclaimed: "And reflecting on their weekend round together, this ruthless competitor admits he was impressed by his presidential partner." After a sound bite of Woods saying Obama could "get to where he's a pretty good stick," Alexander gushed: "In golf-speak, that means the President's got game."

For all the whining that the White House press corps has been doing of late about its inability to "cover" the president while he was on yet another vacation, you might think that these long-suffering reporters could come up with a real question once they did get a chance to talk to him.

And they certainly would, if the president were a Republican. But since he's the leftist Democrat that almost all of them worship, no one was feeling up to committing some actual journalism once President Obama returned to the White House last night. Instead, they decided, in unison, to ask about whether or not he was able to defeat golf star Tiger Woods when the two hit the links in Hawaii:

This afternoon, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell got his hands on excerpts of the remarks that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was preparing to give this evening. Bound and determined to find racism where it doesn't exist, O'Donnell did not disappoint. Taking to the air on Martin Bashir's eponymous program, O'Donnell laid out his case that McConnell's crack that the president "has been working hard to earn a spot on the PGA tour."

That's just plain racist, even if by two or three degrees of separation, O'Donnell explained. The long and short of it: When you think Obama at the PGA, you think of Tiger Woods, and when you think of Tiger Woods, you think about his cheating on his wife. [You can watch the Breitbart video embedded below page break.]

Steroids are back in the news with the arrest of a Canadian doctor charged with providing performance-enhancing drugs to top athletes. It’s a major issue in the sports world, raising the question whether some of today’s most-well-known sports stars violated rules to boost their performance. At the same time, the ethics of how The New York Times handled the investigation also raises serious questions.

At the Times, steroids scandals are big news. Since December 2009, the Times has run at least 42 stories and briefs linking the latest scandal to at least 12 major athletes including golfer Tiger Woods, and baseball players Alex Rodriguez, Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran. Every one of them was analyzed for his connection to Dr. Anthony Galea, who the Times described as “a sports medicine specialist who has treated hundreds of professional athletes across many sports.”

But it’s not the names that were included in the stories that matter. It’s the names that weren’t. In 40 percent of the stories (17 out of 42), reporters refused to disclose who was leaking them information. The very first story included this nebulous sentence: “He is suspected of providing athletes with performance-enhancing drugs, according to several people who have been briefed on the investigation.”

On the eve of The Masters, tournament host and Augusta National chairman Billy Payne delivered a surprise public lecture to golfer Tiger Woods, giving New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey a chance to again make liberal political hay from Augusta's immaculate green fairway in Thursday's "Thanks for the Tasteless Sermon."

They are worse than we knew.

The people who run the Masters are not just stubborn rich guys who don't want female members cluttering up their precious fairways, although that is bad enough.

A little competition is good for consumers, right? If that's the case, it looks promising for consumers of cable business news.

Former CNBC on-air-editor, now the senior contributor for the Fox Business Network, Charles Gasparino vows to provide just that. Gasparino appeared on the Feb. 22 broadcast of FBN's "Imus in the Morning" and explained why he made the move.

"I always wanted to work for Fox," Gasparino said. "That was the bottom line. And it's, you know, I don't take chances with stories, but, there is an entrepreneurial spirit in me where I want to do something different. I would like to build something, be part of building something and that is why I came."

On Friday, we noticed Katie Couric expressing sympathy for Tiger Woods on her Twitter page, that he was at the "epicenter of humiliation" and public judgment "must be very painful." ABC’s Jake Tapper replied that he hoped the "painful" referred to the pain of Tiger’s wife and children. On Saturday, Couric responded to Tapper and our blog on Twitter:

For the record...I think what tiger did was disgusting and reprehensible...but still have some compassion for him and his family!

Couric also tried to show sympathy for Tiger’s wife in her Friday "Katie Couric’s Notebook" commentary, even as she suggested Tiger was "contrite" and "vulnerable," which is not how many viewers found it:

According to ABC, CBS and NBC, an athlete involved in a three-month-old sex scandal is more newsworthy than a statement of principles signed by more than 80 conservative leaders.

Not just more newsworthy. The broadcast network morning shows devoted more than 30 minutes of coverage about Tiger Wood's statement to the press on his sexual "indiscretions" scheduled for Feb. 19. By contrast, the Feb. 17 signing of the Mount Vernon statement by 80 prominent conservative leaders received zero coverage. Both CBS and NBC sent camera crews to the event.

ABC provided the lion's share of the Tiger coverage, giving more than 17 minutes of airtime to the Woods story. A crisis management professional, a family therapist and two sports writers were brought on to speculate about the impact his expected apology would have on Woods' image and career, as well as the pros and cons of his wife Elin appearing alongside him.

Woods coverage on CBS clocked in at more than nine minutes while NBC, currently covering the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, gave Woods only four-and-a-half minutes.

Americans love to talk sports. Polite Americans don't talk religion. So when those two things meet, the news media has no idea what to make of it.

Unfortunately for journalists, sports and religion - Christianity in particular - seem to be publicly mingling more often these days. Some star athletes are more outspoken in their faith, while many others regularly find themselves in need of spiritual, if not legal, redemption.

Liberals in the media don't understand religion and religious people, so when they surface on the playing field, the resulting coverage veers wildly from awkwardly respectful to clueless to downright contemptuous.

Fox's Brit Hume caused a firestorm by suggesting on air that Tiger Woods could find "forgiveness and redemption" in Christianity, rather than the casual Buddhism the golfer has said he practices. Woods, whose marriage and career are in melt-down because of his serial infidelities, should "turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world," Hume said. And in doing so, the former anchorman committed several mortal sins in modern secular America.

The first rule of dinner-table conversation is no hot talk about politics or religion. Apparently there’s a rule regarding the discussion of religion during political talk shows, too.

On "Fox News Sunday" on January 3, the panelists had advanced to that light part of the discussion where they focusing on movies and crime novelists. Venerated news man Brit Hume turned to sports, and predicted Tiger Woods would return to success as a golfer. But if he really wanted to recover as a person, Hume suggested, he should consider Christianity. Woods is a Buddhist, he said, but Christianity offered the forgiveness and redemption that could really make Woods a powerful role model for faith and recovery.

Ka-boom. Oh, what a reaction erupted.

Some in the secular elite acted like Hume had set the national house on fire and broken all the fine china. Some TV talk show hosts quite seriously compared Hume’s comments to those of "Islamic extremists" waging a "holy war."

Conan O'Brien Friday humorously took on rumors surrounding his future on NBC's "Tonight Show."

During his opening monologue, O'Brien addressed the chatter concerning Jay Leno and himself by listing a number of really preposterous rumors including:

• I'm pregnant with Jay's baby.
• Jay's pregnant with my baby.
• We're both pregnant with Tiger Woods' baby.

Much as what Leno did the previous night, O'Brien also took shots at NBC (video embedded below the fold with complete rumor list):

Time TV writer James Poniewozik wrote on his blog Tuned In on Wednesday that he was impressed that Brit Hume wasn’t backing down on his Tiger Woods remarks, but he really wasn’t accepting Hume’s claim that talking about Jesus is much more controversial than talking about Buddha:

If you believe your religion is superior and want to stand by the argument, fine. But crying anti-Christian persecution when you're criticized for making that case on a news show? Get off the cross.

Did Hume literally suggest he was being crucified? No. Poniewozik was responding to an interview Hume granted to D.C. all-news radio station WTOP, in which he suggested "Jesus Christ" could be the two most controversial words in the English language (at the very end of the interview).

Who stole Bonnie Erbe’s chair? U.S. News & World Report writer John Aloysius Farrell (a longtime reporter for The Boston Globe) is the latest media liberal to rip Brit Hume for being "creepy" and saying his incredibly "stupid" piece about how Tiger Woods should try Christianity.

Like many secular progressives, Farrell thinks atheism is safer, more rational, like the Soviets in the Cold War. In his belief that his religion is true, Hume is much more like Islamic zealots who strap bombs to themselves, who we now fight in what he called the Long War:

The Cold War was fought against cruel Commie atheists who—we were warned by our leaders at the time—had no fear of God's wrath because they simply didn't believe in Him. But we survived because, it turned out, the faithless Russians and Red Chinese had no more of an appetite for nuclear incineration than we did.

In the end, the lack of a prospect for celestial paradise made the Communists, despite their weaponry, slightly less scary than our foes in the Long War, who are true believers.

Newsweek religion reporter Lisa Miller, no Bible-thumping fundamentalist she, doesn't understand why the heathen rage against Brit Hume. From her January 5 post at the magazine's The Gaggle blog:

I'm not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians. The outrage that followed Fox News anchor Brit Hume's  plea to Tiger Woods to find Jesus has been totally disproportionate to the statement itself. The usual suspects—MSNBC and The Huffington Post—and indeed the whole liberal left blogosphere leapt all over Hume for his arrogance and conservatism.

[...]

The word "evangelical" comes from the Greek word for gospel, or "good news." Evangelical Christians are those who want to spread the good news. They aren't pretending to believe in salvation through Jesus Christ. They actually do believe that it—and yours, and mine—comes through him. 

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann twice claimed that FNC contributor and former anchor Brit Hume’s public recommendation that Tiger Woods convert to Christianity to help solve his personal problems amounted to trying to "threaten" Woods into conversion. Previewing a segment focusing on Hume’s Monday appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to clarify his words from Fox News Sunday, Olbermann teased the show: "Brit Hume and the attempt to threaten Tiger Woods into converting to Christianity. He does it again."

Olbermann also plugged the segment before a commercial break: "Brit Hume has tried to force Tiger Woods into becoming a Christian again. That in a moment."

The Countdown host introduced the segment, contending again that Hume had tried to "threaten" Woods into becoming a Christian: "Brit Hume of Fox News has not only not apologized for his bizarre on-air attempt to threaten Tiger Woods into converting to Christianity, he`s actually gone further."

Notably, in December 2005, Olbermann distorted the words of former FNC host John Gibson from Gibson's radio interview on the Janet Parshal Show and compared the program to "an Al-Qaeda show on Al-Jazeera talking about infidels."

On Monday's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann slammed FNC's Brit Hume for advising Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity while appearing on yesterday's Fox News Sunday panel, where Hume has regularly appeared for years and contributed his opinions to the discussion in a way that differs from his manner of moderating discussions in a more neutral way when he used to host Special Report with Brit Hume. Although Olbermann later backed away from likening Hume to radical Muslims, during the show's opening teaser, Olbermann did make such a comparison: "An organization proselytizing, trying to force others to convert to its faith alone, you know, just like Islamic extremists."

At one point as the Countdown host plugged a segment in which he discussed Hume with author Dan Savage, the words "Hume's Holy War" were shown at the bottom of the screen as Olbermann spoke: "So Brit Hume tells Tiger Woods he can be forgiven, but only if he converts to Christianity. Fox has given up all pretense, hasn’t it?"

As Olbermann and Savage went on to make fun of Christianity, the MSNBC host at one point quipped: "'WWJDIHS,' which is: What would Jesus do if he strayed?" Savage brought up fringe religious figure Fred Phelps, who has become infamous for holding protests at the funerals of American soldiers, and lumped him in with Hume, Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer. Savage:

Tolerance is a virtue the Left loves to trumpet, except when the intolerable is set forward. In this instance, the intolerable is a gentle Christian evangelistic overture to a celebrity caught in sexual scandal.

Yesterday, Fox News analyst and professing Christian Brit Hume expressed his spiritual concern for Tiger Woods and urged the golf superstar to turn to Christianity for grace and forgiveness during a segment of the January 3 edition of "Fox News Sunday."

For that, Hume is being lambasted by some liberal bloggers, including Atlanta Jounal-Constitution's Jay Bookman who unleashed this venom in a brief three paragraph blog post yesterday afternoon:

The director of the bachelor party gone bad movie "The Hangover" thinks Tiger Woods can regain his image by appearing in the film's sequel.

Welcome to the new American dream: cheat on your wife, destroy your career, lose millions of dollars, go from being one the most popular athletes in the universe to a public laughing stock, and end up in a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

With this apparently in mind, Todd Phillips told HollywoodScoop.com last week that Woods appearing in the sequel to one of this year's top grossing films will "help him regain his image" (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 2:30, vulgarity alert):

Just how far has Tiger Woods' popularity dropped?

Well, the good folks at Disneyland have added a joke about the embattled golf star in their production of "Aladdin -- A Musical Spectacular."

As the Genie explained the rules concerning wishes he will grant to Aladdin, he said:

Rule number two: Just like Dr. Phil, I can't make somebody fall in love with you. I'm only saying that to you once. I had to say it like fifteen times to Tiger Woods. 

The crowd in this video clearly liked the jab (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 1:09, h/t Los Angeles Times): 

Despite a growing sex scandal, golfer Tiger Woods has been named by members of the Associated Press as Athlete of the Decade.

According to AP Sports Enterprise Editor John Affleck:

The Tiger Woods scandal if you will, the, all of the, all of the personal turmoil that Tiger has been through in the past few weeks really had very little effect on the voting. Voting began a few days before his accident, and he had already established a lead, and he maintained that lead, and it even grew a little bit I think in the past couple of weeks. 

Imagine that. His lead GREW after the scandal hit (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon):

Focus on the Family President Jim Daly blasted salacious coverage of the Tiger Woods scandal in the mainstream media, offering assurances that he would refrain from the kind of commentary that often turned into "exploitation."

In a column published last Monday called simply "Tiger Woods," Daly encouraged readers to look in the mirror before judging and "pray for those, like Woods, who are hurting."

Daly explained that he felt compelled to offer a statement, not to repeat juicy stories, but to address an issue hanging on everyone's mind thanks to relentless media coverage:

"Saturday Night Live" opened yesterday's show by mocking media for supposedly under-reporting the extra-marital affairs of three politicians, but the sketch completely ignored how the press boycotted the philandering of Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards for nine months.

The program's producers also opted not to include disgraced former Democrat Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer in the group.

Instead, on stage were Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), played by Jason Sudeikis, Sen John Ensign (R-Nev.), played by Bill Hader, and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), played by Will Forte.

Despite the absurdity of suggesting that Ensign and Sanford's respective affairs were under-reported by the press, "SNL" writers completely avoided the fact that the news media, with the exception of the National Enquirer, boycotted Edwards' affair until after Barack Obama had been declared the Democratic presidential nominee (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

For Newsweek writer Jenny Block, it's not Tiger Woods who got himself into the trouble he's currently facing, it's his marital vows.  

"What should not be tolerated is hypocrisy - and that's where Tiger's vow of marriage got him into trouble," she argued in a Dec. 10 article. "If you want to be monogamous, great - but don't think you can claim it while you sleep around. It's not fair and, quite frankly, it's exhausting."

Block argued that it's not "surprising" to learn of Woods' affairs because his "entire life is based on winning; on having, doing, and being more ... why on earth would anyone think ‘settling down' was even in his vocabulary?"

But Block has a solution to the problem of adultery.

In what could be an advertisement for open marriages, Block explained that she and her husband "jointly decided that monogamy just wasn't for us" after she had an affair with a woman.

I mean really, what right do we have to expect anything from the world's best golfer except the world's best golf?

That was the argument made Wednesday by "Married Jake" of Glamour Magazine at Yahoo's "Shine" site.

The item is called "Why Is Everyone Disappointed in Tiger?" (HT Instapundit). In it, jaded Jake jabs at a substantial portion of the public because, silly us, we thought that the guy was what he and his handlers portrayed.

Here is a graphic cap of Jake's first three paragraphs. The "Related" insert isn't his, and seems more than a little ironic in the circumstances:

Tiger Woods' "transgressions" sparked conversations about why men cheat but it took a comedian to pinpoint the basic reason - lack of character.

Comedian Chuck Nice appeared on the "All Guy Panel" during the fourth hour of Thursday morning's "Today" and blasted men who engage in extramarital affairs.

"I've said this before and I will say it again. And no one wants to accept this as an answer, but here is the reason why men cheat. It is a failure of character. That is it," Nice exclaimed.

"End of story. It's a failure of character," he continued. "A man who has the strong, spiritual conviction to say that although I want to do this, I will rely upon a higher power to make sure and strengthen me so that I am able to stand for my vows is the man who will not cheat. Now, that's the end of it."

There has been a lot of media focus dedicated to the alleged Tiger Woods scandal - even so much that when examined quantitatively, it overshadows more serious issues.

So what will the net result of this media scrutiny be for Tiger? CNBC's sports reporter, Darren Rovell, took a crack at answering that on the Dec. 10 broadcast of "Squawk Box."

"It's 12 straight days in the [New York] Post right now," Rovell said. "Everyday since Nov. 29, there's been a Tiger Woods story. When does it end? We don't know. I'm not going to get into the details of this, but from a business standpoint - how about Donald Trump on 'Extra' yesterday?"