I've been re-watching Friday Night Lights and one of the story lines deals with an assistant coach saying some comments the Panthers' running back Smash Williams and his belief that black players make better running backs than quarterbacks. Now although he didn't say it exactly like that the reporters who was interviewing him spun it their way to make it seem like he was saying only white players can play quarterback. I know this is a fictional storyline, but it is a good example of the media can spin something to cause a story to become bigger than what it is originally meant to be.

This kind of stuff happens all the time in the media especially with sports. If you watch the episode you see that the coach didn't really mean it in a way to be racist or anything he just didn't articulate what he was trying to say the right way.

This reminded of when Rush Limbaugh said on NFL Sunday Countdown that Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted so badly for a black quarterback to succeed. I understand what he was trying to say, but coming from him and in that forum was not the best way to go about it. There might have been some truth to what he said he just should not have used that forum to bring it up. There was a former player on the show who is black and rebuttled politely even though you could visibly tell he was upset.

My point is that when you talk about race in the media you have to be careful as to how you bring it up. You saw it in a fictional show, Friday Night Lights, and in a live NFL Countdown show. Sports and race is a hot button issue because of the diversity of races in sports. Race is a touchy issue in sports and especially when it is being discussed by a white person. There are definitely issues that need to be addressed and there are some good people out there who discuss those issues. The media just needs to be careful when discussing those issues because other media members may take them out of context and spin them a different way.

I recently caught a couple episodes of the Jersey Shore on MTV as they were playing a marathon. I saw the episodes where Snooki got punched by a guy and the aftermath of everything. During the telecast they blacked out the screen when she actually gets punched, but they leave the audio going so you can hear everything that is going. I went to youtube to see if I could find the actual video of her being hit. I typed in Snooki and the number one searched thing that comes up is Snooki gets punched (not sure if this has anything to do with what people think of her or not, but that's seperate). Anyway, it came up and I saw it.

My problem with this is that you're censoring something that I don't think is bad enough to censor. I understand and fully believe that hitting women is wrong and a guy should never do that, but you're blacking out something that is readily available on youtube with the click of a few buttons. If MTV is going to censor this part of the episode then they need to have everything removed from youtube as well. If youtube is showing this clip and it is up there in many different videos then MTV should censor it from when they play the episode.

When MTV is showing other shows that depict drug use on the air, how is that any less worse? You're showing people shooting up heroine or smoking crack, but you won't show a girl getting punched?The point of this isn't a need to see a girl get punched, but rather some responsibility by MTV to monitor and censor everything accordingly. If you're going to censor one thing then how can you justify not censoring something else when it is just as bad if not worse.

I can understand if MTV felt an obligation to take off Snooki getting punched if she went to them and asked for it. But if there are videos of this on youtube it must mean that MTV showed this clip when it originally airing the episode. If they felt they needed to air it then why not just keep showing it in future episodes?