Utah Jazz officials took advantage of some recent public forums to do a little media bashing.

Jazz owner Larry H. Miller, during the press conference to announce the resignation of general manager Tim Howells, said that certain media elements had done a 180-degree turn on his team.Coach Jerry Sloan has made several such references in post-game situations this season. After Wednesday's victory over the Grizzlies, Sloan suggested there are media types who consider the Jazz just a "fair" team.

Hey, fellas. Lighten up.

You're being just a tad hypersensitive.

Except for the occasional caller to talk-radio shows -- and callers don't yet qualify as "the media" -- nobody out here in media land thinks the Jazz are the washed-up has-beens you seem to think we think.

Nobody's accusing the team of lack of effort or lack of interest, which are the ultimate sins in the Jazz hoop universe.

The worst anyone has said, and that includes me, is that the Jazz don't appear to be title contenders.

Does that mean the Jazz CAN'T contend for a title? Of course not. After all, what do the media know? Each year, the media make thousands of predictions regarding every sport imaginable, and each year, many -- if not most -- of them are wrong. Our predictions have no influence on the outcome of games or seasons, except in the sense that occasionally a player or team might get a little extra motivation from some forecaster saying they can't do something. Those predictions are for the benefit of readers and listeners and viewers, made strictly for entertainment purposes.

If we say the Jazz don't appear to have what it takes to contend for a title this season, does that mean we're saying that things can't change? Again, of course not. I stated in a previous column that the Jazz appeared to need a big shooting guard, someone who could give them more scoring punch and maybe some defense against the league's bigger guards. Was that criticism? Not in my book. Criticism would be to say the Jazz didn't try to improve their team, that they behaved like Clippers owner Donald Sterling and sat on their thumbs -- and wallet -- in the offseason. But nobody sane is suggesting that. The Jazz made efforts to land some impact free agents, within the narrow restrictions of the salary cap, and they fell a little short (though Olden Polynice has given them a little more lately). You can't criticize management if players don't want to come here.

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The attitude among the Jazz brass seems to be that if we (the media) say anything even remotely critical of the organization, then we're being disloyal. If that's the case, the perception of the team-media relationship is distorted. The media's loyalty is to their readers, listeners, viewers, and not to the teams we cover. Our responsibility to the team is to be fair, and not take cheap shots, and for the most part, the local media steer clear of that.

Perhaps, in that regard, the Jazz have had it too good for too long. In a different media market, say, New York or Philadelphia or Boston, they'd be routinely grilled and probed and examined by a media contingent that frequently functions as a team's adversary. In Utah, the media are more prone to fawning over the Jazz than to any sort of criticism.

And why should the Jazz take offense if they're measured not by whether they can play good basketball night after night, or make the playoffs, or win a Midwest Division title, but on whether they can win a championship? This team raised the bar of high expectations when it made the NBA Finals for two straight seasons not so long ago. As long as they have Karl Malone and John Stockton playing together, they're going to be measured against the highest standard -- their ability to bring home a ring. And that should be considered a compliment, not a criticism.

As for Sloan's idea that there are folks out here who think the Jazz are just "fair," well, if anyone thinks that, they're nincompoops. As of Friday, the Jazz had the fourth-best record in the Western Conference. They can still, on any given night, beat any team in this league. They still have some players who, when they're clicking, can leave you marveling at the precision manner in which they dissect an opponent. They may not be the team they were two years ago -- an opinion that is still yet to be proven -- but they're a whole lot better than fair.

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