On Frozen Blog

Cup'pa Joe

Back when La Canfora was on the hockey beat I exchanged email with him, often commending him for the quality of his work. I learned that he held hockey close to his heart, following it closely from his youth in Baltimore.

In the movie ‘Thank You for Smoking,’ Nick Naylor is the chief lobbyist and very public lead spokesperson for Big Tobacco, well remunerated for defending the indefensible. Once a week he lunches with the “MOD Squad” — other self-described “merchants of death,” lobbyists for alcohol and firearms. At various points in the film he’s asked about his ability to deliver the message he daily does, that there’s no link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

“Ninety nine percent of the rationale for the [career] paths we choose is a mortgage . . . We’ve all got a mortgage to pay,” he responds.

Initially I wrote off La Canfora’s hockey sellout as just another move to better manage the mortgage. It almost certainly is. But his Redskins’ file in yesterday’s WaPost offered me another view of that decision.

I’m not sure what La Canfora thinks of the Caps’ rebuild, but I’m reasonably sure that if Ted Leonsis had embarked upon nearly 10 years of playing GM of the Caps and delivered losing seasons with almost unfailing regularity (interrupted only by mediocre ones), and had he remained on the team’s beat, La Canfora would have called on Leonsis on it.

When Ted Leonsis briefly played GM with the Jaromir Jagr deal and it failed, he called himself out and resolved to remove himself, forever, from the hockey personnel side of managing the Caps. These days, I wonder how many Redskins’ fans would like to see that team’s owner do the same thing?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Yesterday La Canfora’s lead read:

“For the first time since just before last year’s NFL draft, Washington Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder met with reporters yesterday and praised the direction of the organization, professing his belief that the club has improved significantly this offseason.”

What follows, predictably, is an uncritical reckoning of Synder’s once-a-year pow-wow with the press pack. Imagine if Leonsis had installed George McPhee as a puppet GM, as Snyder did with Charlie Casserly and Marty Schottenheimer (not bothering with a nominal GM since) (at this point, who’s left to fool?), and led last-place finishes the past two seasons and agreed to meet with the press once a year. Think WaPost might have something critical to say about that?

In case you hadn’t noticed, the NFL draft is taking place this weekend, and once again, Synder will play a lead role in whom the Skins will select.

Can you imagine if congressional appropriators for NASA thought themselves qualified to guide rockets?

Rhetorical question: does any Skins’ beat reporter in town have the ability to critique CzarDanny, to call him out on his ego-induced Reign of Error?

This weekend, absent an 11th-hour deal, the 5-11 Redskins under GM Snyder have assured themselves one selection of the first 142 football players drafted. In year eight of the Danny, precisely what charted course is the burgandy and gold following?

More importantly, why am I about the only guy in town asking this?

Denver, like Washington, would have to be described as a football-first kind of town. Orange Crush and all. It was that way before John Elway arrived. In January, while returning from business, I had a stopover there and was perusing a Sunday edition of the Denver Post. The Broncos were still playing football, but I was struck at the balance of coverage of competing sports. I found a sizable stand-alone story of the Denver Pioneers’ hockey game from the night before. Another, comparably sized, for the Colorado College Tigers’ hockey team and its result from Saturday night. The Avs had their own file. There was even a fourth file on hockey, penned by the paper’s hockey columnist Terry Frei. By the time I got to that John Denver’s ‘Rocky Mountain High’ was providing an internal soundtrack for my hockey heart.

I was having a close encounter with balanced, professionalism journalism.

Inadvertently, Jason La Canfora yesterday held up a mirror to his news organization’s wildly warped news values. GM Snyder — simultaneously a profiteer and a parody — has run a once-proud franchise into the standings cellar, deigns to convene with the press once a year, and is rarely if ever held accountable by the media here for his mayhem. But on 15th Street the next morning the above-the-fold beat goes on, fawning in its uncritical deference.

Journalistic malignancy.

At least there are warning labels on cigarette packs.