Jirieally Did It This Time

Ever since the Jiri NSFW fiasco blew up the Toronto media this week, I've been wrestling with how to handle it. As posted yesterday, when we found out about the "story" a week ago, we decided it was foolishness, and to leave it be. If only the mitten-stringers could have followed our lead. Because in their handling of the story, they have revealed far more than just the pixellated schlong of a naive young winger; the real story here is how much we have learned about the stagnant cesspit that is Leafs media coverage.

That's why this post will be short on jokes. Once I decided to write on this, I initially thought I'd give it a light touch, lambasting the usual idiots, and we could all move on to poking fun at Richard Griffin's addiction to The View, or Steve Simmons's tenuous grip on logic. But the more I read the coverage of Tlusty, the angrier I got. Quite frankly, this is the easily the lowest point Leafs media has sunk in my memory. Regular readers, of this site or the usual organs, will know what a sorry benchmark that is. And just as watching the Leafs get waxed 5-1 by Ottawa was a nadir that allowed observers to dissect the main problems (awful defensive zone coverage, poor coaching, strange inability to show up for important games) besetting the Buds on the ice, so does the sorry and disturbing spectacle of middle-aged sportswriters getting all het up over a Leaf rookie's private nudie shots highlight some distressing themes of Toronto hockey media and the wider national culture.

First, we have the mittenstringers' inability to actually break a story, even if you believe Jiri NSFW is a legitimate or important one. I, like most other Leaf fans with a computer and a pulse, heard about/saw the photos last week. They were linked on Deadspin. They were disseminated on other blogs and message boards. Yet the mitten-stringers didn't get on the case till about a week later, which in Internet time is about the lapse between, oh, the signing of the Magna Carta and the October Revolution. Heckuva job, boys. Welcome to the Internets - don't forget to check out the funny cat pictures!

Of course, this really isn't any kind of story, is it? Lonely kid in foreign country meets girl, sends embarassing pictures to her, they get out on the Internet, personal embarassment for kid. Wait, it is a story - it's pretty much the third reel of American Pie! Is it a hockey story? Is it important to anyone, save Jiri Tlusty, his family, and whoever put the pictures out there? Absolutely not. Yet, as Shoalts pointed out, (and yes, Shoalts is the only mainstream columnist I've seen with a cromulent take on this one)  the feeding frenzy erupts nonetheless, with the myriad papers, columnists, TV stations and call in hosts rushing to tear this kid up, give us "their take," cast the first stone. All of them of course, pale in the face of the Sun, the only paper with the stones to exploit a 19-year old's nakedness and humiliation by running the photo on the front page. The Little Paper That Could!

If any of them are called on this bullshit, what we will hear was "it was the story." "Everyone else was covering it." The combination of this herd mentality and a corporate view that dollars, eyeballs, hit counts, are the only measure of success is why more people cover a Paris Hilton court appearance than a global AIDS pandemic, or closer to home, exactly what our country is doing over in Afghanistan anyways.

On that topic, let's discuss the bag of wasted cells that published the photos in the first place, completely with a sniggering "T-Bone in the Morning" style interview that consisted mostly of variations on "So Jiri, are you a fag or what huhhuh?" The guy claims his ambition is to be the Canadian Perez Hilton (cause Ryan Seacrest is taken, I guess- Campanelli Represent!), a statement so sad and vacuous that, on the heels of Are You Smarter Than A - Canadian - Fifth Grader? makes we want to give up on this country for good and spend the rest of my days in bitter, homicidal jungle exile, Mosquito Coast-style. George Grant was right.

Thanks be to the mittenstringers, for they have doubled this douchebag's hits. Worse, they have participated  in and validated his witless homophobia, homophobia that anyone with a passing familiarity with junior hockey knows is endemic and systematic, a black loathing infesting the Game all levels, the Game that the likes of Ron MacLean solemnly invoke as representing the true ethos of Canada. Ron's more right than he knows. Wonder why it was the tongues picture that The Sun chose to run on its front page?

That's why the moralizing, the salve needed by the journos to justify using humiliation and hate to move units, stinks so foully. Reading Cox (which Mr Jorn will fully eviscerate tonight - it's just that bad), one call smell the hypocrisy. Leafs journalists who have jumped on Jiri, ask yourself - is this what you wanted to do with your life? Is this what being a sportswriter was supposed to be like? For the final irony here is that it isn't Jiri who has really been exposed - it's you. And you should be ashamed of yourselves.