National Sports Journalism Center

The social media attack on Jay Cutler was unprecedented. That can be said with certainty, if only because social media technology did not exist until five minutes ago. However large a romantic fool this makes me, I'd also like to think such an attack would not have happened because, once upon a time, sports journalists were proud of being professional reporters. Let's go back to John Elway before he became a god. Let's remember John Elway failing, again, to Win The Big One. I refuse to believe that any reporter at Denver's Rocky Mountain News would have gone to the phone to ask NFL players around the nation watching on teevee, "Elway, still a choking dog?"

The Elway news was to be reported in that stadium that day, not from somebody's theater room a thousand miles away. The news was there to be reported by men and women asking questions of people involved in the news event. If a Rocky columnist believed Elway to be a choking dog and wrote it, the opinion mattered because the columnist had earned credibility with years of commentary built on shoe-leather reporting. But in the wake of the social media attack on Jay Cutler – more important, the fact that the attack was widely reported by mainstream media – I must quote from the sayings of John P. McEnroe Jr. He once said, "YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!"

But they were serious. Real newspapers and real websites reported social media messages thumbed across the miles by NFL players beating their hairy chests. A linebacker: "I have to be crawling and can't get up to come off the field." Later: "There is no medicine for a guy with no guts and no heart." A cornerback who played for a decade without making a tackle unless he had to: "I never question a player's injury, but I do question a player's heart." A lineman: "If I'm on the Chicago team Jay Cutler has to wait ‘til me and the team shower (and) get dressed and leave before he comes in the locker room." Another lineman: "As a guy with 20 knee surgeries you'd have to drag me out on stretcher to leave a championship game."

Good grief, we are engulfed by a tsunami of testosterone. Some inconvenient facts here. None of these men knew the extent of Cutler's injury or his history playing hurt. None knew what doctors and coaches decided during the halftime break. None knew what Lovie Smith, the Bears' coach, had planned. And, without exception, Cutler's teammates defended him. The saddest fact of all: Even after the game, when real news organizations had done their own reporting, they still used quotes from these men questioning Cutler's courage and savaging his character.

Not one of the players quoted knew anything more than the guy scratching his crotch at the next bar stool. None had any connection to the Bears coaching staff or medical staff. There was no reason that any of them would have been searched out for a quote on Cutler. Yet their social media attack was reported as news even inside gamers and columns written in the stadium that day. News? Oh, please. The quotes served only two purposes: 1) they reinforced suspicions that repeated concussions affect a man's reasoning powers, and 2) they reinforced suspicions that reporters and columnists with a personal distaste for the sullen, snarky Cutler used the quotes to say what they would never have said on their own.

The most responsible use of the social media "news" – maybe the only responsible use – was made by Jeff MacGregor. He used the players' quotes to riff on Cutler's well-documented personal reputation, not his courage. For ESPN.com, MacGregor wrote, "Jay Cutler is a riddle wrapped in a mystery hidden inside a jackass. . . . I have no doubt that Jay Cutler was too seriously hurt to return to the field on Sunday. I also have no doubt that he is now the most openly disrespected star in the NFL. If you're being dissed Twitter-style in real time by your peers, your reputation is junk."

Anyway, now we're done with the jackass quarterback and we're on to suspended-for-sexual-misbehavior quarterback – on to the Super Bowl where we'll likely hear sweet music played in honor of that exemplar of hairy-chested men everywhere, Ben Roethlisberger. My friend Charlie Pierce says, Wait, wait . . .

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John Doran, editor of the Helena Independent Record, provides an update to a recent column: "The manager pulled the right strings; the closer, fastball blazing, retired the side. I hired my top recruit . . . and he begins in late February. He's Jesse Zentz, currently the lead prep sports reporter at the Idaho Statesman in Boise. He grew up in Billings, Mont., and was a top distance runner at University of Montana in the late 1990s. His wife, Michele, grew up in Whitefish and also excelled as a soccer player at UM. We're very excited to have him on staff, and he'll make an incredible contribution to the readers of the Independent Record."

My column dealt with Doran's frustration with job applicants who were unable to deliver an appealing cover letter. Subsequently, those applicants lost out to a candidate who had a personal and professional history with Doran.

"It's a bit of long story," he wrote in an e-mail. "Jesse was the top male distance runner at the University of Montana when my wife was the top female runner (before we met) in the mid-1990s. They're good friends, and as such I've met him a couple times and followed his career. As he began to excel in sports reporting, and as I began to ascend in newspaper leadership roles, I followed him much more closely with the focus of eventually landing him at a paper where I worked. . . . I heavily recruited him two years ago, it just wasn't the right time for his family. He and his wife are Montana natives, and 'round these parts, that carries some weight. Helena is a big running community, and since Jesse is still a very competitive distance runner, he'll fit in here in his personal life, too. We're very excited to nab him. He has an excellent and well-rounded background, and his experience will be instrumental in a small sports department like ours."

The lesson is, keep runnin'.