[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’ve been fuming about this since — oh, check the date and time on this graphic:

For the NFL football or Michigan uninformed, the Detroit Lions played the Buffalo Bills on Sunday evening at home. The hometown crowd was amped up because the Lions had a 12-1 season and already garnered a playoff slot.

But they also knew things would be tense because of the number of injured players on the team.

The Bills opened up a 14-point lead in the first quarter and the Lions were never able to catch them; the final score was 48-42.

That’s the frame from which the above report in Gannett’s local affiliate the Detroit Free Press (Freep) reported on CBS Sports’ coverage of the game.

Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the US; it’s the owner and publisher of USA Today and 32 other news papers. Freep’s criticism of CBS Sports coverage follows decades of CBS missteps in the Detroit market.

During what little I watched of the game, CBS’s talking heads were shit. Very little commentary on a couple lousy calls, or not-calls, in at least one case of pass interference early in the game.

I won’t bother to post his crap here but commentator Tony Romo was a dick, not exactly endearing CBS to the Detroit Metro audience. You’d think he’d know by now there’s quarterback smack talk and then there’s former player professional broadcaster sports talk, the latter for which he is paid.

All that aside, this article does more to criticize another media outlet’s coverage than we have seen among national outlets who have systematically fucked up coverage for decades.

How and why can a large newspaper owned by a national organization freely criticize a national broadcast and streaming media organization about its coverage, but the same kinds of organizations have failed our democracy by bootlicking for fascists?

By bootlicking I offer as an example ABC News which folded like a broken lawn chair settling $15 million on Trump who’d claimed he was defamed by ABC. ABC had used the same language leveled at Trump in court but somehow a national news broadcaster is no longer permitted to exercise free speech reporting facts in Trumplandia.

After the gross moral and ethical failure of the Washington Post to make an endorsement in the presidential race, after Los Angeles Times’ similar failing, one can only wonder what’s left of the country’s once-free press.

Don’t get me started on the bullshit coverage which parroted right-wing talking points over the last three presidential elections, from “But her emails” to “Joe’s old” to “Hunter Biden Hunter Biden Hunter Biden.”

NYU’s Jay Rosen has encouraged news media to depart from its toxic horse race coverage of elections and move toward reporting the stakes of the race. Stakes coverage should be a minimum across all coverage of politics and governance.

If media can’t do that — and they’ve demonstrated they can’t — if they insist on treating our democratic governance like sports, the least they can do is criticize their own industry’s performance like they do when it comes to football.

This is an open thread.