Whitlock: How Georgia’s blowout victory proves corporate media are the enemy of the people

Corporate media consensus prophesies doom.

That’s my takeaway from last night’s embarrassing college football national championship game. The Georgia Bulldogs curb-stomped Texas Christian University 65-7 in college football’s showcase event.

For more than 30 years, I’ve argued that a playoff format would not improve major college football. The overwhelming majority of my peers completely disagreed with my take. They argued the lack of a postseason format diminished the game and denied participants and fans the all-important knowledge of which is the best team in Division I football.

I lost the argument 30 years ago, when the NCAA adopted the Bowl Coalition. A few years later, the coalition became the Bowl Championship Series, pitting the two top-ranked teams in a national championship game. In 2014, major college football moved to a four-game playoff system. In 2024, the playoffs will expand to 12 teams.

Has college football improved in the last 25 years? Has the game’s stature been elevated by a playoff format?

No. Not one bit.

Schools, coaches, executives, and now even the players have all made more money. But the product, experience, and stature have not been elevated. Greed, corruption, disloyalty, and irresponsibility have been elevated across college sports.

As I argued from the outset, college football’s regular season has been diminished by its postseason. When there was no postseason, college football uniquely hosted the most important regular season in all of team sports. Every single game absolutely mattered. When Alabama played a mid-major cupcake, the inevitable outcome was important. Bama needed to win big and impressively. Style points mattered. In securing a national title, Georgia Tech’s 35-point victory over Chattanooga in 1990 was every bit as important as its bowl victory over Nebraska.

Last night’s national title game generated no real buzz. The playoff format ended the importance and prestige of New Year’s Day bowl games. The Sunday end of the NFL regular season overshadows Monday’s end to the college football season.

Many of college football’s best players skip the postseason unless their team qualified for the playoffs. The bowl season has been rendered irrelevant.

College football is worse than it was 30 years ago. The focus on generating more and more money for a handful of elites has justified a selfishness among all participants. Players transfer at a whim. Coaches are afraid to promote any values inconsistent with the whims of social media. Schools bolt conferences and abandon rivalries at the whiff of an additional dollar.

No one in corporate media will acknowledge their mistake or the fact that their arguments served establishment greed rather than the needs of young men.

The whole scenario reminds me of corporate media’s role in the experimental medical trials forced on the public during the so-called COVID pandemic.

No one in the media will admit his or her complicity in paving the road to vaccine insanity. Journalists and broadcasters did the bidding of Big Pharma corporations and the government. The media did not serve the public.

Watch this clip of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pleading with viewers to take the experimental medical trial.

“If you’re unvaccinated, you have a much higher chance of this newly transmissible variant we have never seen before,” she said. “And it’s the unvaccinated people who it’s going to make sick.”

This really isn’t a partisan issue. Donald Trump still pushes the experimental medical trials. Establishment conservatives such as Ben Shapiro irresponsibly promoted the experiment vaccines. Here’s a tweet from Ben chastising Elijah Schaffer for arguing that man’s natural immune system was superior to the COVID experiments.

“The vaccine is 95% effective in preventing you from getting the virus, and also mitigates the severity of the disease,” Shapiro stated. To his credit, Shapiro has walked back his vaccine support. He’s one of the very few.

ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith and Michael Wilbon routinely blasted Kyrie Irving for refusing the experimental medical trial. Now that it’s obvious the “vaccines” do little to prevent transmission of the virus and have several potential serious side effects, Smith and Wilbon have yet to apologize to Irving or football star Aaron Rodgers.

The purpose of mainstream media seems to be to mislead us. Cynics argue that this has always been true. I don’t believe that. I worked in mainstream journalism during the 1990s and 2000s. There was a bias against conservative perspectives. But the open hostility to truth and coordinated intention to mislead are new. They’re a byproduct of media consolidation and subsequent lack of competition.

Mainstream media was most healthy in the 1950s and 1960s when there were two and three newspapers in most major and midsize cities. Competition kept the media honest. My favorite journalist of all time – Chicago columnist Mike Royko – excelled because all the Chicago newspapers would pay him to write for them. The competition allowed him to write uncomfortable truths about the politicians and business leaders who ran Chicago.

By the time I became a sports columnist in Kansas City in the mid-1990s, there was only one newspaper, the KC Star. But there were newspapers around the country that desired my services. The local radio and TV stations competed for my services. The competition afforded me the freedom to challenge the corporations, politicians, coaches, executives, and millionaire athletes.

Now, there’s a media coalition, similar to the coalition that ruined college football. College football is meant to be a regional sport, not a national tournament. The game is healthiest when Alabama and Georgia focus on winning the SEC rather than a national championship. It’s better when Ohio State and Michigan covet Big Ten supremacy rather than national supremacy.

National and global societies do not function as fairly as local societies. America’s founders knew this. That’s why they intended for states to reign supreme. The founders of college football intended for conferences to reign supreme. Now powerful conferences such as the PAC-12 and Big 12 may vanish in the next decade.

Corporate media consensus convinced us to blow up a system that was working as intended and serving football fans quite well. The mainstream media have been transformed into the enemy of the people, the promoters of a Utopian global society that empowers and enriches the elite and their billion-dollar corporations.