It's becoming routine for the left-stream media to deviate from the sports stories unfolding in front of them to mine for politically incorrect social media history. It happened again Saturday night when Kyler Murray, the Oklahoma University quarterback, was named winner of the Heisman Trophy, college football's top honor.
In practically no time at all, the media found "anti-gay slurs" he'd written on Twitter six years ago and shamed him on his biggest night. Outkick The Coverage blogger Clay Travis examined this alarming media trend and says we are "enabling rabid jackals of mob-enswirled outrage" and the public is sick of it.
"This has become an all too common theme and, frankly, it’s patently absurd and indefensible from a journalistic perspective to continue the trend of shaming teenagers for the things they Tweeted when they were children. But this is just the tip of the social media outrage iceberg."
Travis (see above photo) says what happened to Murray is the latest in a string of stories like this over recent years, "a perpetual and never ending excavation of past Tweets from sports stars that are unearthed at the moment they achieve their greatest athletic accomplishments. And I think it’s way past time these stories stop."
This year alone the PC media police have also shamed baseball players Josh Hader, Trea Turner, Michael Kopech and Sean Newcomb and football player Josh Allen for dusty old social media comments about LGBTQ people.
Society has determined that teenagers should not be tried as adults for their juvenile crimes, so how, Travis asks, can we justify sensationalizing teenage Tweets: "If your criminal past isn’t held against you as an adult, why should your teenage social media stupidity?"
This gotcha mentality by the media is nothing more than "cheap, clickbait trash designed to allow a media outlet to capitalize on the surging interest in an athlete at the time of their greatest achievement," Travis writes. "They also allow a cheap moralizing from the typical social justice warriors, who hold up the athlete as the latest symbol of everything wrong with American life. For the perpetually aggrieved in our modern days sports oppression Olympics, it’s manna from heaven."
It's the tearing down of athletes who have just accomplished something significant, by adults who should know better. Travis advises us to:
"Think about who we’re rewarding here — we’re rewarding adult losers whose first thought when they heard of an athlete’s big accomplishment was to go search for 'bad' words on the athlete’s Twitter account. Is that the kind of behavior we really want to encourage, an America where adult achievement is immediately ripped down in favor of childish misbehavior? Of course not."
"The media standard for acceptable behavior is antiquated, artificial, and significantly, fake," Travis continued. "The media is policing an artificial reality, one where people don’t talk and behave as humans talk and behave."
Social media is a far left-wing echo chamber "dripping with perpetual identity politics laden grievance. It’s the outrage Olympics every damn day and instead of being the adults in the room, the media exacerbates this tension, leading to one moment of satirical absurdity after another." Creative freedom has yielded to mind control. It's insanity. And, "All of us are a Tweet away from perpetual unemployment. Even if, as the case may be, those Tweets were sent when you were 14 years old."
Travis adds:
"The frustration is so rampant and palpable right now that I feel like Kyler Murray, for many, was a tipping point in athletics, a sense that much of our media is broken, artificial, and, yes, fake. The outrage isn’t real, the emotions aren’t either, it’s all just artifice, a simulacrum of reality."
...
"We, all of the reasonable adults in this country, need to attack the media whenever we see it happening, defend the targets of the abuse and we need to reject it as out of hand. ...
"It’s not healthy for our country to police every single word and it’s noxious for our republic to eliminate all nuance and complexity in favor of enabling rabid jackals of mob-enswirled outrage."
Travis's solution to the problem? Stop letting America's perpetually outraged media losers police society. Media shaming must end now.
