Former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, Jack Clark, was fired from his St. Louis sports radio show this week. Why? Because he accused Albert Pujols of being a PED user. Pujols immediately brought a lawsuit against both Jack Clark and his radio station employers explaining he was forced to do so in order to defend his character against these kind of reckless lies on the airways.
Jack Clark's employers, distancing themselves as fast as they could from Clark, fired him.
Good. For some reason, in this age of known PED use and abuse, everyone thinks its okay to accuse anyone of anything they want because they THINK they have the free speech right to do it. Well guess what Jack Clark? As you just found out, it's still illegal to tell LIES about people just to get ratings. Libel and slander are still very active laws in America, and if you don't have any real proof other than vaguely remembering a former trainer telling you ten years ago that Albert juiced, you really have to keep your big mouth shut.
That same trainer for years has continually denied that he has ever said anything like that.
Baseball fans are so quick to judge because media personalities are quick to judge. Maybe if a few more media-types wold start losing their jobs over incidents like this, we would see less sensationalist journalism in America.
Feel free to speak and print the facts. Keep your accusatory opinions to yourself. I'm hoping that bloggers and letter writers to articles on ESPN start getting the same treatment. There has to be a fire before you can yell, "fire." Anything else is just an unsubstantiated opinion. And some opinions can and should get you in hot water.
Responsible journalism used to mean more than over-hyped opinion. Sadly, now days, the average person doesn't even know the difference. Most folks don't even know what an informed opinion is, thinking anything they write is just as valid as anything anyone else writes. Read letters to the editor on controversial news subjects on any website and you'll be AMAZED at the number of likes that uninformed opinions produce. It's not just the writers of those letters that bother me, no, it's the number of supporters that seem to gather around them.
THAT'S what Pujols is fighting against. "Opinionated Ignorance" should really be the first Horseman of the Apocalypse. That's the horseman that's going to bring about the death of civilization. And he's riding more and more proudly, higher in the saddle, with each passing day.
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