What Favre, LeBron and Burning of the Quran Have in Common
Jeff Collier
| September 10, 2010
The last few days a crazy guy in south Florida claiming to be a Christ-follower has gotten a ton of press over his planned event to burn a boat load of Qurans. Every news outlet has made this their lead story and almost everyone knows about it at this point.
What I find particularly funny is how this story parallels the sports drama this summer with Brett Favre and LeBron James. In the case of Favre the news (ESPN) made a mountain out of a mole hill. Favre is old, he hurts and he clearly hates training camp. Instead of just letting him sit quietly and figure out his life, ESPN sends their journalists down to Mississippi to harass Favre in his pickup truck.
With LeBron, ESPN injected itself into a situation to create a news story when there wasn't one, so they could make money. ESPN gave LeBron a time slot to look a jerk instead of allowing him to quietly sign with Miami.
In the same way all these news outlets are giving airtime to the Quran burning and making a mountain out of a mole hill. Just like LeBron and Favre, if the news outlets decide not to cover it then no one in the world cares, no one gets hurt and life goes on.
The guy doing the burning is off his rocker, let's let him live in crazy land by himself. Don't drag my sanity down by spreading his nonsense with a bullhorn.
But, we're dealing with an industry who's slogan is "if it bleeds, it leads." Clearly not the most rational people in the world.
A few other oddities with this story:
PS - I really hope South Park lampoons everyone in this story.
What I find particularly funny is how this story parallels the sports drama this summer with Brett Favre and LeBron James. In the case of Favre the news (ESPN) made a mountain out of a mole hill. Favre is old, he hurts and he clearly hates training camp. Instead of just letting him sit quietly and figure out his life, ESPN sends their journalists down to Mississippi to harass Favre in his pickup truck.
With LeBron, ESPN injected itself into a situation to create a news story when there wasn't one, so they could make money. ESPN gave LeBron a time slot to look a jerk instead of allowing him to quietly sign with Miami.
In the same way all these news outlets are giving airtime to the Quran burning and making a mountain out of a mole hill. Just like LeBron and Favre, if the news outlets decide not to cover it then no one in the world cares, no one gets hurt and life goes on.
The guy doing the burning is off his rocker, let's let him live in crazy land by himself. Don't drag my sanity down by spreading his nonsense with a bullhorn.
But, we're dealing with an industry who's slogan is "if it bleeds, it leads." Clearly not the most rational people in the world.
A few other oddities with this story:
- The Associated Press is willing to cover the drama leading up to the Quran burning, but won't cover the actual event or publish any photos.
- The US military burned a bunch of bibles in Afghanistan a few years back and it didn't get mass media attention.
- Some crazy Muslims burned bibles and crosses a few years back in Gaza and it didn't get mass media attention.
- Hosting provider Rackspace shutdown service to the crazy guy's Website because they said it had "hate speech" on it. Talk about fanatical censorship.
- Interpol released a warning to a 100+ countries letting them know a violent backlash from crazy Muslims is probable if the Quran burning goes forward.
PS - I really hope South Park lampoons everyone in this story.
Jeff Collier is the founder of Zetify and currently lives in Austin.