It is hardly the first time someone has been used by a reporter to advance their own agenda. A Sports of Times Column by Juliet Macur certainly makes it very clear she doesn't like racing and will do anything to find others who do not as well. Even if they do like racing.
I've been reading newspapers a long time, particularly the Times, and many, many Sports of the Times pieces, going back to when they were written by Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson. I've never been to journalism school, and I don't really know how things are being taught, but I do know that in a prior period of time, "back in the day" as the millennials I guess would say, no one would write a piece in the Times and insert themselves personally, using I and other first person references.
Ms. Macur's Monday piece, In A Sport of Beautiful animals, Ugliness Is Unavoidable is a screed against racing, using the backdrop of American Pharoah's romp in Sunday's Haskell to be an indictment of racing.
The prior posting took Ms. Macur's writing to task. And now one of the poor, prime people quoted in the story, Tamara Hernandez, who had an unfortunate place on line waiting to use the ladies room at Monmouth on Sunday that was close enough to Ms. Macur who overheard conversation and chatted the ladies up, has suffered personal embarrassment.
I fell sorry for Ms. Hernandez, who like the other 60,000 plus people who came to Monmouth on Sunday didn't go there because they hated racing. But Ms. Macur obviously does. She needs another assignment. Maybe fashion.
Another reporter posted on Twitter a text box of Ms. Hernandez's reply to being quoted. Misquoted. The text, as transcribed below exactly as it appeared on Twitter, came from a AT&T mobile.nytimes.com site. I really don't know what that is, or how the other reporter came to get it.
Part of the text from Ms. Macur's Monday piece goes:
One group of spectators had a better perch: about two dozen women lined up at the giant windows of the grandstand’s fifth-floor restroom. And while waiting there, the women talked and talked about the horse who, in June, had become the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years.
“It’s crazy that he’s got to race again,” said Ashlee Petroski, who works with the Rowan University equestrian team. “Hasn’t he done what he was supposed to do? Oh, why don’t they let him be just a horse?”
Tamara Hernandez, 42, who works in construction, piped in: “I know. God forbid he gets hurt. He is just amazing and just perfect, and it would crush me to see him broken. But he’s here because people are greedy.”
I was once leaving work that had become the scene of something truly horrific. When I finally hit the street leaving the building, a cluster of reporters descended on me, with their id cards flapping on their chests, and asked me to comment. They looked so young I wondered why they weren't in school. Did I comment? No. Listen to what your mother told you.
Don't talk to strangers.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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