COMMENTARY
Alan Pergament: John Madden’s local ties debunked
This is what I’m thinking:
• It was hard to avoid laughter when reading various blogs about the retirement of announcing legend John Madden that claimed he started his coaching career at Buffalo State College.
This supposedly happened after his brief NFL playing career with the Philadelphia Eagles ended after the 1958 season.
I couldn’t figure out where any of the bloggers writing about Madden came up with the Buffalo State connection.
So I Googled “Madden and Buffalo State College” and Wikipedia came up. As any journalist knows, Wikipedia is one of the least reliable “sources” because anyone can add material.
The Wikipedia item even says that Madden was coaching at Buffalo State while he was getting his master’s degree at Cal Poly. As one wag said, that would have been quite a bus ride every day.
But as absurd as it sounded, I still had to check to see if it was accurate. A check of The Buffalo News library failed to find any article connecting Madden and Buffalo State.
However, I did find an item that noted that Jerry Boyes became Buffalo State’s first full-time football coach in 1986, more than a quarter of a century after Madden supposedly was a coach there.
I called Larry Felser, the longtime NFL writer for The Buffalo News. “Not a chance,” said Felser. “His whole life was spent on the West Coast.”
A check of Madden’s official NBC biography doesn’t mention Buffalo State and had him coaching at a junior college in California at about the same time.
Finally, I called the public relations department at Buffalo State, which assuredly would want to trumpet any possible association with Madden. A Buffalo State spokesperson said the college started its football program in 1981, more than 20 years after Madden supposedly coached there. The spokesperson added there might have been a club program before that, but he’s never heard of Madden having any roots here.
The Madden-ing story is a lesson in journalism. It illustrates how easy it can be in the age of irresponsible bloggers to spread false and even silly information. Sadly, fact-checking has become practically a lost art when it actually is easier to do than ever before because of the Internet. It also is easier to spread false information than ever before. As a journalist, you just have to go to the right Web sites. And Wikipedia isn’t one of them.
• According to a high-level VH-1 source, cameras will be following Terrell Owens around in Buffalo when he arrives here in mid-May. Tom Calderone, the Buffalo State graduate who is president of VH-1, adds that Owens has been “great to work with” and the program has “taken a nice turn.”
• I’m not sure what this means about the fate of “Reaper,” the CW show co-created by Western New York native Michele Fazekas, but co-star Tyler Labine is in the cast of a new Fox pilot. Labine is in what is known as “second position” for the Fox show, which means the part may have to be recast if “Reaper” continues.
• I’m a fan of WNED-TV’s Friday night movies and this week’s is a keeper. Cary Grant stars in the 1941 film, “Suspicion.”
• All the local stations are emphasizing their Web sites these days. But at least one station can be a little slow to report on the comings and goings of their own staffers. As of Tuesday, the biography of Steve Barber is still on Channel 7’s site even though he left the station to join a financial firm more than week ago. I guess we’re fortunate that Irv Weinstein’s bio isn’t on the Web site.
• “Heroes,” which not too long ago was NBC’s hottest drama, ends its season early on Monday. It has suffered huge ratings losses this season but has been renewed for another season because NBC is in such rough shape.
• How rough are things at NBC? It is so desperate for viewers that it has offered disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich a spot in a reality series, “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,” that has the same title as a failed ABC series that ran six years ago. Clearly, NBC and Blago have something in common —the inability to be ashamed.
• You may have noticed that ABC is promoting tonight’s episode of “Lost” as a special, “The Story of the Oceanic 6.” That’s a nice way of saying it is a retrospective or highlights show, though I imagine some viewers will be fooled by the promos.
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