On to even less serious matters

I was trying to come up with a thoughtful, well-written response to Matt's post about unaffiliated voters, but I think I'll stick with what I know.

(Besides, I agree with him. How boring is that?)

By now some of you have probably heard or seen the video clip of Fox's Danyelle Sargent asking Mike Singletary if he called the late Bill Walsh when he got the 49ers job. Of course, that part of the interview wasn't supposed to air. But it got on a satellite somewhere, and then was aired on Mike Francesa's sports show in New York. It has now made the rounds on YouTube.

(An aside: Sargent was also known from her ESPN days. She dropped the f-bomb during a live broadcast.)

Sargent went on the Dan Patrick radio show Tuesday to explain herself. Her explanation that she meant to say something else is certainly believable; how many of us have "misspoken?" And I believe her.

But there are a couple issues here: Let's start with Francesa's patronizing "young lady" comment coming out of the video clip. Hmmm. . . . something tells me, if a male made this mistake, he wouldn't have been held up as a "f-in' idiot," to use one of the kinder descriptions that are being used in the YouTube comments (Speaking of which, I'd love to see the folks leaving the comments do Sargent's job for an hour. 99 percent of them would freeze solid or look even more, ahem, "idiotic.").

Look, I can take or leave sideline reporters. Like all professions, some are good, some not. Sargent hasn't really been around long enough to establish a reputation one way or the other. After all, this was her first sideline assignment. And I think the job of sideline reporter itself has some good parts (sniffing out the story on an injury, for example), and bad parts (is interviewing a coach or player coming off the floor/field really necessary? Even thoughtful, more intelligent ones talk in cliches and never make any worthwhile comments. )

One of my big whin-, er, gripes about broadcast journalism has long been its seeming lack of accountability when compared with print journalism. After all, if there's a screw-up in a newspaper, there are thousands of pieces of evidence of that mistake. However, with YouTube and DVRs, the broadcast media has a level of watchdog that, perhaps ironically, may be unlike anything newspapers have to deal with.

And to use a print journalism analogy, Sargent's error with Singletary was the equivalent of an editor catching a mistake before it reaches the paper. And she started over and asked a different question to do her job.

And when all is said and done, this will blow over. As it should.

- JDE2