The Prince of Nigeria Wants To Talk To You

See, NHL?  When you don’t play, ESPN spends its whole time talking about some football player’s pretend internet girlfriend

Though, to be fair, this is the latest into January that anyone has actually cared about college football.

A perfectly valid point.   

So, everyone must be pretty aware of the sorry state of journalism these days, and how the mainstream media favors sensationalism over actual content and usefulness of news items.  That's all well and good.  However, one of the things that I ask for, and it doesn't seem like that much to me, is for stories shown on the news to be actually relevant to the type of program that I'm watching.  For example, if I'm watching CNN for news (BTW...I totally don't watch CNN for news), and a story about Paris Hilton's dating life comes on, I get angry.  Not exclusively, but mostly because celebrity gossip is not news.  There are celebrity gossip shows, and if one of them starts showing pictures of a civil war in Africa, I would be equally confused and angered,  

Imagine my surprise when this morning, ESPN is showing SportsCenter....ostensibly a sports show...and they start showing middling celebrity gossip instead of sports.  This, by itself, is ridiculous, but the very nature of the story is even worse.  For those of you who haven't Kept Up With The Story, a star college football player fell in love with a random person he met on the internets.  He was sad when this person died of cancer, only to "find out" recently that the person was entirely fictional.  Holy Frijoles!  You mean somebody made crap up on the internets!?  This is shocking and horrifying news!  You can't just make stuff up on the internets....it's a sacred set of tubes for all perfectly valid information and videos of cats.

Okay, so let's all have a little chuckle at the poor football player's expense and move on with life, shall we?  NOPE!  The entire first 15 minutes of SportsCenter was devoted to this story. 

Then I asked myself why this was allowed to happen.  The answer is obvious...NO NHL!  If Gary Bettman had been properly fired long ago, and there was no lockout, we'd at least have hockey to talk about during sports shows, and they wouldn't be resorting to filling entire hours of programming with garbage like this.  There would be some actual...you know...sports to go over during a sports show.  One more thing Battman screwed up.  Is he fired yet?