Media Meanies

By Tasha Dean

For once, an NFL team other than the Dallas Cowboys has all the drama.

Yes...a team boasting the likes of Bill Parcells, Jerry Jones, and Terrell Owens has been living in perfect harmony for the past few weeks and all is right in Big D.

The Giants (6-5) on the other hand...

Let's just say that if they were a daytime drama, they would win an Emmy. It's a bona fide train wreck and you just can't help but watch it.

New York's season started off as a fairytale. They began the season 6-2, which included a five-game winning streak and a 36-22 road win against the Cowboys. The NFC East was their house - everyone else was just lucky to live in it.

The Giants were in control. The Giants were winning. More importantly, the Giants were all getting along.

But since their win against the Boys, the Giants' fortunes have not been as sweet. New York has lost three-straight games to Chicago, Jacksonville, and just this past weekend, the G-Men suffered a humiliating loss to the Tennessee Titans in which they squandered a 21-0 fourth quarter lead.

The Giants, who previously possessed chemistry and cohesiveness that marks Super Bowl contenders, have now been reduced to a team divided and a team who has issues with everyone - their coach, their fans, themselves, and most recently, the media.

Just like Dallas, the Giants have their fair share of personalities in the locker room. Coach Tom Coughlin, Plaxico Burress, Michael Strahan, and the most brash of all, Jeremy Shockey, have all come under fire for their conduct during the three-game slide.

Many think that Coughlin has lost control of his team. His play-calling and leadership have been under fire, even drawing ire from the prototypical "nice guy" Tiki Barber.

Shockey has already given the Cowboys even more motivation for Sunday's game when he stated that Dallas had "no chance in hell" to beat the Giants if they played up to their potential.

Making the chaos even more chaotic is Strahan, who has been out three games with a foot injury. His comments about Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress and his conduct after those comments have made headlines all week.

The play that arguably started the Giants collapse against Tennessee happened when Burress made a lackluster effort to bring down Adam "Pacman" Jones after he intercepted Eli Manning's pass.

"It's a shame," Strahan said on the radio Monday. "You can't give up. You can't quit, because you're not quitting on yourself, you're quitting on everybody. I don't quite understand what his lack of motivation is in those types of situations."

If anyone saw the play by Burress, they would wholeheartedly agree that the former Steelers wideout gave up.

Strahan's comments were right. The venue that he decided to voice them in was dead wrong.

Since then, the Giants defensive end later backed away from his statements by placing the blame on ESPN reporter Kelly Naqi. It now seems as if the circle of criticism that the Giants have found themselves in has progressed to the media.

At first, it was Coughlin's fault, then it was Manning's fault, then it was Burress' fault, and as of right now, it's the media's fault.

In the world of sports, the easy way out is to blame the media. They are sometimes seen as leeches - the ones who suck the life out of teams...the ones who replace good energy with the bad all for the sake of selling papers.

For a person who eventually wants to become a part of this entity, this is disturbing.

The "I can do no wrong" attitude that athletes have nowadays has never been so apparent. When things do not go as planned, athletes rarely look at themselves as possibly having something to do with their team's woes.

The best thing to do now for some athletes is to back away from taking responsibility for their actions and words. Placing the blame on reporters, newspapers, magazines, and anyone with the ability to type words on a computer has become the popular thing to do.

It is a reporter's job to report and it cannot get more simple than that.

Strahan's conduct against Naqi was uncalled for - she simply repeated what he said. If Strahan did not want this attention, he should have never went on a radio show and publicly blasted Burress.

Along with calling out Burress, Strahan criticized the media for wanting to breed negativity in the Giants clubhouse.

"The only thing that bothers me is the fact that you mislead people outside of this locker room when you guys spend more time with us than we damn near spend with ourselves sometimes, and that's a shame," Strahan said. "If you are going to be negative, be negative because if you think it bothers me, I don't give a damn what you write."

It is not ground-breaking news that controversy sells movies, music, books, and any other type of media. Sports journalism is no different.

But when the negativity comes from the players themselves, they should take responsibility for the repurcussions that follow.

Ethical journalists do not make statements up - they simply write them down. If athletes do not want their statements to appear in the media, then they must have the understanding that expressing their opinions behind closed doors is the best thing to do. At the very least, they must have the common sense not to go on a radio show. (After all, the radio is part of the media. Isn't it ironic, Strahan?)

When it's all said and done, if the Giants beat the Cowboys on Sunday, none of this will even matter. The media will become their friends once again, touting the Giants as a team on the upswing and as a team who has righted the ship.

But until then, the relationship that the Giants have with themselves and with the media is an extremely strained one.

And while the soap opera continues to thicken in New York, the Cowboys are smiling for they are no longer the drama kings of the NFL - a title that they hope to avoid for the rest of the season.

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