In case you've been living in a…wait a sec, let's just not go there…uh,if you haven't been reading the newspaper or reading the internets for the past few days, you might have missed the dumbest fucking decision probably ever made by an editor anywhere on the planet. Wait make that three editors: Keith Sharon, Todd Harmonson and David Bean. Yesterday MSNBC's Keith Olbermann denounced them by name for reading and approving a sports column by Mark Whicker which detailed all the sporting news that kidnapping, rape and decades-long backyard trailer imprisonment victim Jaycee Dugard missed while she was locked up by the psychopath who abducted her when she was 11 years old.
You can tell simply by my summary of Whicker's column that it is the type of dumb idea that might come into your head after huffing gasoline for several hours, or if you simply woke up with the singular ambition of pissing off everyone who can read, thereby risking your career in the pursuit of neither being funny nor forgivable. But it's actually worse than that. But wait, don't take my word for it. Let's let Whicker speak for himself here. Remember, what you are about to read apparently passed through the trusted hands of no less than three presumably experienced and college-educated editors.
After the jump, read excerpts from Whicker's column and also a video of Olbermann's rant.
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Here's how the column begins:
It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.
Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.
She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while.
She
was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a
forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.
Now, that's deprivation.
Ha, ha ha. No. Not. Funny. Also: not true. I personally have done none of these things—in fact, I'm not too proud to admit I don't even know what a box score is–and I don't feel the slightest bit deprived. But I digress. My point is this column actually gets worse. But let's skip all the boring sports shit Whicker highlights–what, the Angels won the World Series?–and go straight to the ending:
And ballplayers, who always invent the slang no matter what ESPN
would have you believe, came up with an expression for a home run that
you might appreciate.
Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.
As Olbermann pointed out, every columnist will write a piece of shit every now and again, which is why we have editors. Whicker has already apologized for writing the piece in the first place, but it'd be nice to see what his editors can say about what went through their minds when they read and approved his copy.
Here's Olbermann's rant, to which we can think of nothing further to add.
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Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).