THERE ARE TIMES when you begin to grow weary of hearing professional athletes, entertainers and politicians frivolously complain that their words were taken out of context by the media. Or that the reporters were inaccurate and irresponsible.
This past week, there were two such occasions.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who before ascending to that position was a media darling of TV networks because of his fluency in English and his always-available knee-jerk reaction to breaking events, appointed a new head of his country's beset spy agency, the Mossad.
In doing so, he blamed the news media for Mossad's recently sullied image. Never mind that Mossad agents were caught red-handed trying to assassinate an Islamic militant in Jordan, and equally red-handed setting up a wiretap in Switzerland.
The media reported those failures and, in doing so, earned inclusion in the Mossad downfall story. In announcing the new Mossad head, Netanyahu said the damage had been done to the Mossad "as a result of mishaps, but also as a result of unnecessary, irresponsible and inaccurate reporting."
The translation: "Yes, the Mossad screwed up. We apologized to the countries we offended. We fired the head of Mossad as a result. But the media should not have reported it. In our democracy, we like to keep our failures private."
Then there is the case of Brett Butler, a now-retired baseball player who last week popped off that one of his former teammates was "a moody self-centered, '90s player."
No sooner had that quote appeared in the Los Angeles Times then Butler issued a retort, saying that his quote was "taken out of context."
What is "context"? According to Butler, the interview with the L.A. Times writer was over two days and the stuff about catcher Mike Piazza being self-centered took only 90 seconds of the con-ver-sa-tion.
I would imagine they spent a lot of time talking about Butler's career, his family, his health and his future. But somewhere along the line, the reporter got to the recent failures of Butler's former team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
According to Bill Plaschke's original March 2 story, Butler unexpectedly popped off about Piazza. Wrote Plaschke: "During an interview Friday at his Atlanta-area home, answering a general question, Butler surprisingly offered me his two cents."
If you are spending a mundane two days talking with a player who had a pretty good career and showed great courage in coming back from an ordeal with throat cancer, and suddenly the player slimes one of his former teammates as lacking leadership and possessing a monster ego, what would you report: What Butler's kids had for breakfast that morning?
Butler didn't just utter a single aspersion about Piazza. He was also quoted: "Mike Piazza is the greatest hitter I have ever been around . . . but you can't build around Piazza because he is not a leader. You know all that stuff that went down last year about Mike being the leader, calling out the team, all that stuff? It was all fabricated."
Butler's comments about Piazza were part of the writer's general question about the problems of the Dodgers doing late-season fadeaways, and that makes them within context.
What happened was that Butler said something he wishes he had back. He never denied saying it. He never told the writer what he was about to say was off the record. He just opened his mouth and let spew. Now he doesn't like to see it in print, so he cries something about "out of context" just as Netanyahu says reporting about the Mossad being caught in the act of trying to assassinate someone in Jordan is "unnecessary reporting."
I would hope the public can see through some of these counterfeit laments and concentrate better on the real, not conjured, faults of the news media.