Oh, you’ve done gone and pissed me off. I apologize for any vulgarity in this piece…unless it comes from ABC News.
Go to ABC News and check out this entertainment news piece. It’s about “ultimate fighting” and this is apparently part of a recurring segment called “Trend Spotting”, which is about what’s hot in the culture right now. This is one of the most embarrassing and breathtakingly stupid examples of mainstream mainstream ignorance. Willful ignore, mind you. Sloppy, 3rd-rate willful ignorance.
This piece is like the Murphy’s Law of news articles: if they can get a fact wrong, they will get a fact wrong. I say “they” because the fault lies not only with the article’s author (Nellie Sciutto) but also with any of the supervising producers. The errors here also come in every shape and size. They commit small infractions by calling pronouncing the “R” in Royce and describe “pummeling” as:
Who the fuck told her this should cut his/her head off right now. Use and position of the head is important when pummeling, but that’s hardly the object of it. And it’s not like you can’t find pummeling definitions on the Internet by doing a very basic search, could you? Anywho, let’s move on to bigger matters.
How about they then describe the sport as one with almost no rules? Like, saying the sport has fewer rules today than it did in 1993? Like, saying eye gouging is still legal? This comes on top of saying there are no rounds, no strategy, no gloves, no athletic commissions, and no real sporting to the act. They then suggest the sport’s popularity is part and parcel of the “no rules” ethos! And to top it all off, there is both written and video content to this piece of work, yet they somehow manage to get everything wrong in BOTH forms of media. Bravo, fuck-ups at ABC News! Bra-fucking-vo.
They then interview theGarv, who is a forum poster on MMA.tv’s The UnderGround (screename: Crazy Zimmerman). How we got that interview, I’ll never know. theGarv is competent about the sport, but I don’t know how media savvy he is. He allowed the interviewer to suggest MMA was much like pro-wrestling as a product and a professional sport (this, of course, doesn’t take into account the litany of other pathetic questions she asked).
This shitty yet illuminating piece of work reads almost like an Onion article. It’s that far off the mark that it has the feel of a mockumentary. The only problem is that Scuitto and her crack team of ape producers turned in arguably the worst piece of journalism to come out of a vaunted news organization this year/ever. In doing so, they mock and disgrace themselves. Voraciously disgrace themselves, if such a thing is even possible. They are either brain dead and beyond repair or hostile to the idea of working as hard as a professional journalist. Either way, they don’t deserve the job and ABC News needs to offer an apology.
Tout-de-fucking-suite, my friends.
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