In case you or your significant other has been pretty much embedded into your television sets watching college and pro football the last few days, we are indeed already past New Year's Day and officially into 2012. While no one on our staff makes individual New Year's resolutions, collectively, we are resolving to continue giving you all the great cartoons, commentary and news links that we have in the past, as we begin our fourth year.
We're also resolving to take a serious look at priorities, both ours and those of other people and organizations, as we enter a new year - including political, media, and even entertainment priorities.
Of course, that last category may have something to do with our attempt to understand Monday's embarrassing and appalling actions at the college football bowl game involving the Nebraska Cornhuskers. We're not talking about the horrendously bad officiating, or even the on-field fight, apparently started by South Carolina's Alshon Jeffery, that ended with the ejections from the game of both Jeffery and Nebraska's Alfonse Dennard.
The thing that was hardest for us to understand was that after getting booted for starting a fight, with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, not only was South Carolina's player allowed back on the field, and handed the trophy - he was made the game's MVP.
This is NOT the way to begin 2012, regardless of who won. Contrary to the old saying, it is not simply who wins or loses - it is equally important how one plays the game that matters.
As members of the media, we've been appalled for much of the last two weeks at how so-called news - especially about politics - has been handled by those in our profession who didn't take the time off. To say the coverage of politics and news has been treated like a bad reality show would be giving more credit to horrible TV programming than the reality TV genre has ever earned. To state that the GOP presidential contest has been treated like a horse race would insult the vary nature of both horses and racing.
In short, the priorities of Americans are out of whack, in a way that the hyper-typical media meme about blue vs red, Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals vs conservatives just doesn't cover.
We are, to say the least, appalled and disgusted, with everything we've described so far today. So we're making some changes, behind the scenes, to start off 2012 - changes we've been moving towards for some time.
To start with, we likely won't cover the horserace of politics as much this year, even though it's an election year. There are whole lists of things many of our colleagues will be talking about in politics this year - and many of the topics they'll be beating into mush aren't that important at all.
For example, the GOP nominee - barring a massive fight at the Republican national convention - will be Mitt Romney. Period.
We're also going to be looking at how sports and entertainment mesh with politics, much as we did with the Penn State incident. We're not going as far as award-winning sports reporter Dave Zirin, and ignoring college football altogether. But we are taking the recent words of author John Woods seriously, especially as it pertains to Husker sports.
There is more to life, more to politics, more to news, more to entertainment, than what many of our colleagues provide - and far more than what many Americans take in, as part of their daily media diet.
We resolve this year, more than ever, to be the example of what our colleagues in the news & media business SHOULD be, and should strive for.
There is more to life than just more.
