Insensitive

Four people died, and some writers have decided it would be funny to connect that event to a recent football story with a “funny” play on words.

I could not believe this when I saw it.

NJ.com’s Dom Cosentino and ESPN’s Jane McManus describing the Mike Pettine story about Rex giving away the Jets playbook this way . . .

McManus tweeted – “Mike Westhoff on Pettineghazi: ‘Rex doesn’t give out a notebook like it’s candy cmon Mike. Take care of things in Cleveland leave us alone.'”

In a blog, Consentino, “In his SNY interview, Phil Simms also discusses the Pettineghazi playbook flap.”

My heart dropped to my stomach when I read these. I was surprised they went there.

This is a play on words that connects the playbook scandal to the tragedy at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya. For this unaware of what happened, here is a short synopsis from Wikipedia.

“On the evening of September 11, 2012, Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer.[6] Stevens was the first U.S. Ambassador killed on duty since 1979. Several hours later, in the early morning of the next day, a second assault targeted a nearby CIA annex in a different compound about one mile away, killing two CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty.”

I’m not going to get into the weeds on this. This is a sports website. But whatever your opinion is on what happened here, I think we can all agree, it was a terrible tragedy.

I think we can all agree with people who killed Stevens, Smith, Woods and Doherty are evil.

And for a couple of sportswriters to make light of this, by a weak attempt at humor, is troubling.

I don’t think the families of Stevens, Smith, Woods and Doherty would appreciate this being turned into comedy.

We are in a sports journalism age where people seem to be in a contest to “out-snark” each other on a regular basis. You often see this snarky behavior really manifest itself on Twitter.

Consentino came to NJ.com from “Deadspin,” a website that is often about being edgy. They always seem to be on a mission to be super cool.

So clearly NJ.com wants Consentino to be edgy and snarky in his Jets coverage.

But to me, this goes too far.

I literally got nauseous when I read the NJ.com and ESPN references to “Pettineghazi.”

This isn’t a joke.

It’s a tragedy.

“It is an example of shallow thinking,” said one veteran sportswriter. “Someone wanted to come up with an alternative to the old -gate suffix and said to himself/herself, ‘Hey, what about Benghazi? Let’s call it Pettineghazi!’ Then others said, hey, that works for me, and they started using it. And all of them failed to ask themselves, does this sound silly? And is this really the best wordplay, to use something relating to the deaths of four Americans in Libya to describe a playbook ending up in the wrong hands.”

Very well put.

July 1, 2104

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