The Instant Historian: Five People You Don't Need To Tweet About
By Ty Duffy
The sports media uses Twitter. Twitter tends to become clogged with redundancy. In the interest of clearing the pipes, here are five individuals you don’t need to tweet about. We all agree with you about them. Zinging them earns you zero Internet points. Bringing up any of these five, except in the most extreme circumstances, should be a faux pas akin to retweeting Bill Simmons.
SKIP BAYLESS
Don your cynical cap. Orient a sports entity to drive traffic without shame. You would focus on LeBron and the NFL, with the occasional dabble in Tiger. It would spout extreme opinions, twisting the most mundane topics into feverish debates.
That is First Take. Media folks detest it. It fuses the worst tendencies in the industry. The audience, pursuing sports content for entertainment, enjoys it. Skip Bayless is an entertainer. He plays a heel. He spouts those extreme opinions for a living. We all disagree with him. That’s the point. Whatever Skip does or says, he does not sit at the adult table. This is manifest. There’s no need to counter every single inane disparagement of LeBron.
RICK REILLY
Rick Reilly once wrote beautiful, heartfelt prose. He lost the fire, recycled riffs, doubled down on his corny jokes, and kept cashing checks. Very large checks. Reilly embodied the excesses of print media. Coming down on Reilly from the top rope was a sports blogging right of passage.
We’ve been over this. We’re so over this any practical distinction between blogging and mainstream media no longer exists. We’re so over this we can discuss Reilly’s career in the past tense. He retired from writing. Reilly still has a Twitter account. He still makes groan-worthy jokes. The speed of Internet political correctness may have passed him by. The thing is he no longer matters and hasn’t for some time. Let him drift off into ridonkulous land.
DARREN ROVELL
Darren Rovell created a niche. He covers the business side of sports. He has been quite successful at it. Most follow sports for the romance and the empathy (especially those who write). Rovell, unfailingly, converts that sentiment into cold, hard dollars and cents. He presents your sports fandom for what it is: an irrational fixation major corporations manipulate to make money. Rovell can be grating. On Twitter, he can come off as kind of a douche. This territory is well trodden. If the useful tidbits he tweets aren’t worth it, you can unfollow and mute him.
DONALD TRUMP
Liberals hate Donald Trump. Conservatives hate Donald Trump. Undecided Ohio residents hate Donald Trump. The 2015 media cycle will ejaculate strong opinions confirming and contrarian about Donald Trump, as though there’s some debate about him we’re all having. Trump is odious. His candidacy is frivolous. He’s the Roland the Farter of the 2016 election. The media hamster wheel won’t stop for common sense. But, we don’t need your bog standard liberal tweets castigating Trump. Every possible joke about his hair has been made, repeatedly, for thirty years. Every Twitter mention serves Donald Trump’s true purpose: to draw attention to Donald Trump. Don’t contribute.
ANN COULTER
Ann Coulter provokes the left, for a living. She chooses hot button issues (gay marriage, immigration, radical Islam, soccer). She makes biased, outlandish points to incite a reaction. She amuses the like-minded. She irritates the opposed. She’s, more or less, the Skip Bayless of politics, which means you don’t have to pay attention to her. Coulter converts no one. She exerts no real influence. She busts out one-liners at CPAC, hopeful one will catch on. Coulter is not the mainstream cultural force she was a decade ago. Twitter launched in July 2006, about the last time anyone would have needed to tweet about her.