Never shy with his thoughts and opinions, FOX Sports’ columnist Jason Whitlock recently took aim at sports writers Charlie Pierce and Rick Reilly for the way they’ve covered the Tiger Woods scandal.

The article is long, so here are some excerpts on Pierce:

Pierce’s latest offering is an I-told-you-so column. He rages that Tiger’s puritan image is phony and points out that he wrote in great detail in 1997 that Woods was a scandalous, tail-chasing hound.

I don’t know how many rich, famous and good-looking 21-year-old athletes/men Charlie Pierce has interviewed. The ones I’ve met have all been scandalous, tail-chasing hounds. No different from the frat boys I met in college or the corner boys hustling on the block.

Pierce should’ve opened his column by admitting he dislikes Woods and his opinion is skewed by that bias. We’re journalists. We’re supposed to be transparent. Two weeks ago on Deadspin, Pierce trashed Bill Simmons and his New York Times-bestselling book. In that hit piece, Pierce failed to mention that he tried to befriend and mentor Simmons at the beginning of the decade and that in 2002 Simmons told Pierce to go (expletive) himself. That little nugget of information would’ve been very enlightening when reading Pierce’s Deadspin take.
I’m sharing this because it’s important for the public to know that the media act dishonestly all the time. We’re far more phony than Tiger Woods ever could be.

And Reilly:

Let me give you another example. Reilly, the millionaire columnist for ESPN, wrote a damning piece for Sports Illustrated in 2004 about then-Colorado football coach Gary Barnett and a female kicker who claimed she was raped by a couple of her teammates. Reilly blasted Barnett, saying the coach didn’t properly monitor the more than 100 players on his team. Reilly never mentioned that just weeks before police investigated a sexual-assault allegation that stemmed from a high school party at Reilly’s Denver home. Reilly was not at home at the time. But his children allegedly hosted a party at his home and a 14-year-old girl claimed she was assaulted by two high school football players.

This is the moral high horse Tiger’s critics ride on. These are the people shouting on TV and whining in print that Tiger, in his last public statement, had the audacity to mildly criticize the way the mainstream media handled this controversy.

This is all a bad joke. This whole affair highlights why the mainstream media have lost the public’s trust. We don’t deserve it. We’re controlled by hidden agendas.

Tiger won’t invite us to his private party. And now that we’ve been given this slight opening, we’re going to try to convince you that he’s a horrible person, morally unfit to wear Jack Nicklaus’ crown.

Whether you agree with Whitlock or not, you have to hand it to the guy for not playing favorites when it comes to athletes or the media.

The piece about Reilly is interesting because it paints the columnist as a hypocrite. That begs the question: Are we all (and when I mean all, I mean the media and fans) hypocrites when it comes to judging athletes, coaches or other sports figures? We’re fine with hammering Tiger, Kobe Bryant or Michael Vick for not being honest with the public from the start of their scandals, but would we do the same thing in their shoes? I’m not excusing what those athletes did, but Whitlock makes an interesting point in that some in the media get on their high horse and yet they themselves have skeletons in their closets too.

It makes you think whether or not we as the media or the public are too hard on sports figures when they mess up. One could argue that since they have money and fame that being criticized comes with the territory but how much is too much? And should we put ourselves in their shoes more before we judge?

I’m not drawing a conclusion either way, but again, Whitlock raises some interesting questions in his article.


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