Have you ever heard a song for the first time, immediately decided that you don’t like it, and then found yourself humming it two weeks later? That’s because when things become more familiar or recognizable we naturally begin to like or prefer them. It’s called the exposure effect. BAM! My B.A. in psychology finally served a purpose!
I think that same effect exists in our exposure to news media. At first glance something may not seem particularly newsworthy, but if we are continually exposed to updates or new reports about it, suddenly it is newsworthy. In an odd way, things can be important merely because they garner the news’ attention. It can reach a point where the coverage of the story, or the person at the center of the story, becomes a story in and of itself.
Think about this scenario in the abstract: a college football player is accused of signing autographs for money. The player denies it and, after he is interviewed by NCAA investigators, there isn’t enough evidence to say with certainty that the player profited. The NCAA suspends him for one half of one game, however, for getting involved with professional memorabilia dealers.
In a vacuum, this story would probably warrant nothing more than a 10-second mention on ESPN or a short blurb on the sports page. But taken within the context of the growing media obsession with Johnny Manziel, it inspired countless editorials, televised debates, and now…”Johnny Cam.”
You see, CBS, in all its wisdom, has decided to train a camera on Johnny Manziel for the entirety of the game this Saturday against Alabama. “No matter where he is and no matter what part of the game it is, we will have a shot of it,” says CBS coordinating producer Craig Silver. “If he is anywhere in sight of that camera, we will catch it.”
Networks have done this with other athletes in the past; following the best player on the field to capture the oft not seen moments of the game is not unprecedented. But this is not your normal puff-piece-producing player coverage.
The fact CBS is capable of producing a televised football game in addition to the simultaneous documentation of one player’s day is fairly remarkable, both from a technological and financial standpoint. Not too long ago America would have sat huddled around radios for the game of the week and received the account of the game as told through the eyes of another person. No visuals, no frills, just factual dictation. Now we can sit in our living rooms and enjoy the luxury of not only a stunningly accurate depiction of the game, but of multiple games, and multiple aspects of each game.
How technology advances over time provides some insight into what we collectively value. The “Johnny Cam” evidences two things: our love of sports and our obsession with public persona. My question is whether it’s a good thing that we have advanced technology in the effort to feed that obsession.
Silver claims that he and CBS have no intention of making this anything more than an unique look at a compelling young football player. As he told Richard Deitsch of SI.com, “[w]e are not judge and jury. It is not our place, especially within the body of the broadcast, to state whether he should or should not be playing, should have been suspended or should not have been suspended. The way I approach it is how has all this stuff affected him as a football player and affected his team.”
That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a “cop out.” Perhaps CBS will not use its platform this Saturday to overtly condemn Johnny Manziel, but does it have to? Given the context of the media surrounding the kid, isn’t potentially exposing every move he makes just throwing gas on an already raging fire? CBS won’t have to say “look at what Manziel is doing now! What a punk!” Viewers already get it. Each rub of the thumb and index finger will be noted as a classless taunt. Every laugh with his teammates will be viewed as crass. And God forbid he show frustration after an interception. I mean, maturity issues and all…
It’s hard to imagine Silver could keep a straight face while claiming that CBS intends to hover over Manziel simply to expose “how all this stuff affected him as a football player and affected his team.” You don’t need to see Manziel pick his nose on the bench in order to gauge how he and his team are handling themselves. Watching the actual game would probably suffice for that purpose.
Instead, this is a choice to film the world’s newest and greatest media pariah in hopes of creating the next story, or at very least reinvigorate the existing narrative. After all, they didn’t stake out Tiger Woods’ house to gain insight into how his golf game might be affected by his infidelity. And they certainly didn’t follow Brett Favre around for a month because they thought he could take the Jets to the Super Bowl.
To be fair, in most other instances training a camera on one player all game would probably be for the exact purpose that Silver states. It could offer some insight to how the players see the game and interact on the sidelines. But how boring, right? That’s why it doesn’t happen that often. Footage of players on the sideline or during timeouts is boring. Need evidence, see “Kobe Doin’ Work.” And that had Spike Lee on it for God sake!
This is a neat trick that the media has up its sleeve; it can actually create its own meat to feed on. If I told you that the quarterback at Texas A&M is a disrespectful, self-entitled 20-year-old jerk, you probably wouldn’t be shocked. No newsflash there. But the media has demanded so much of Johnny Manziel and voiced its collective frustration with his shortcomings to us so regularly that suddenly the fact that he’s a jerk matters to us. We suddenly have a problem with the quarterback at Texas A&M being a jerk. Why? Why do we care that Johnny Manziel is a jerk?
When you meet a person, you immediately start sizing them up. That’s not a good or a bad thing; it’s just a fact of life. In order to efficiently navigate the world, we need to create cognitive shortcuts that allow us to categorize the people and things that we encounter regularly. This helps us “make sense” of things. It allows us to be comfortable with people once we “get to know” them because we believe we have an understanding of what they are like, what they are capable of, and their general character traits.
In the same way that we need to understand the people that we meet, the media must define public figures. Once a public persona is created and refined with a certain level of clarity, it makes it much easier to report on and interpret the actions that the person takes. If this were not the case, this article would have started, “There is a quarterback at Texas A&M named Johnny Manziel…” But if you are reading this, you probably already have all the background you need to understand without the need for introduction or background.
We rely on the media to give us this character information so that we can make judgments and conclusions about public figures that we have never met as if we know them. If a person’s public persona is not defined then that person cannot exist in the public consciousness. We cannot identify with them and gain an understanding of who the person “is.” Without an associated identity, actions are meaningless to us, or at least less meaningful.
For that reason, the process of fame follows a bell shaped curve, where your actions have greater and greater influence on how you are perceived as your garner more and more attention. Each action noted by the public informs its opinion about you. At some point your level of fame crests and each action thereafter takes on less and less importance because your persona has already been clearly defined and needs less filling in.
To illustrate the point, think of it like this: three athletes with exceptional skills enter the NBA at the same time. All become internationally famous. One of them cheats on his wife during college but reconciles and lives happily with her throughout his pro career. The second player cheats on his wife in the middle of his NBA career. The third cheats on his wife after he retires. Which of the three gets “infidelity” mentioned in their public obituary?
To some extent, this seems unfair. You can take the same actions and perform the behavior over the course of your life and yet be pinned with entirely different public profiles depending on when the public was particularly interested. But, what makes the process a little more “fair” is that it is generally a repeated and gradual process.
Because actions taken just prior to and at the height of fame are what primarily drives the public’s perception, it allows a person who is rising to fame to do what politicians call “control the narrative.” In other words, they can play an active role in how their image or persona is ultimately painted. In addition, the process allows for a small learning curve in that mistakes early on can be swept away in lieu of a more polished presentation when the public’s interest is beginning to peak.
But this was not the process for Johnny Manziel, primarily because he was forbidden from talking to reporters as part of Coach Kevin Sumlin’s standard policy against freshmen doing media, and partially because of his early on-field success. Johnny Football became the most recognized and celebrated player in college football while remaining a virtual unknown. The media was handed Johnny Football with little more than that nickname and some game tape and told “go!” And what the media found was a crass, guarded, self-important 20-year old punk.
The media is at no fault for exposing Johnny Manziel to the world and letting him make an ass of himself. If a person really is a jerk and they perform in the public eye, there really is no getting around that. But it is probably guilty of conflation. There was a media vacuum around Manziel until this offseason and once the vaccum punctured the media rushed in – we rushed in – to answer the question “who is Johnny Manziel?” as quickly as possible.
It can only be a thirst for an answer to that question that would drive us to infer character from Twitter beefs. Or derive a potential drinking problem from a missed alarm. Or a blatant disregard for all authority from a simple gesture during a football game. With limited information and a burning need to define Manziel’s character, small stories became large.
And, again, that is not to say that the collective judgments made about Manziel are not correct. Johnny Manziel may be the most disrespectful and unpleasant person in college football. Who would really know? But the point of all this is, why does that matter? In terms of the “Johnny Cam”, is it a good thing that we have advanced technology and put our money or effort toward something that will do nothing more than serve our vile, albeit innate, need to judge and critique people that we have never even met?
Johnny Manziel became famous because he is really good at football. How he interacts with other people on a personal level doesn’t change that. Whether he got paid to sign autographs doesn’t change that, nor does lying to an NCAA investigator change that. So why are we so hung up on these things? When we are intrigued by a person’s physical capabilities, why do we suddenly demand that they be a wonderful person? If we wanted to idolize wonderful people, why not look somewhere other than sports or Hollywood?
I think the answer is what I laid out above. We seek for people to admire for things unrelated to character but want so badly for them to be good people once we have identified them because we invest in them. We invest our mental and emotional energy in them. When they do not live up to our desires, our disappointment leads us to take solace, perhaps even grieve, by listening to self-proclaimed moral authorities within the media who take turns levying shots at the athlete, voicing our frustrations on our behalf.
I have heard the argument that if Johnny Manziel, or anyone for that matter, doesn’t like media scrutiny then he should just find something else to do. Stop playing football. Or just stop acting like an ass. Fair point, but why do we expect the examined person to deal with the hang-ups of the examiners? Why not change our expectations to only ask a really good quarterback to continue being a really good quarterback?
To be clear, I do not think Manziel deserves pity. Although he was probably too young and too inexperienced to know what he had gotten into until it was too late, he’s going to make out just fine. The people who are getting hosed here is us, the media consumers. We are force-fed cheap journalism rather than thoughtful analysis. We have been taught to perk up for headlines like “Manziel At It Again” and pass by thoughtful reporting or analysis as too taxing or time consuming.
This Johnny Cam thing might turn out just fine. Maybe it will paint Manziel as a great team leader and we’ll all love him for it. But this has the potential to be a circus and that’s why the idea has gotten attention. The camera won’t add any insight to the game; it will serve only to display a college sophomore’s behavior for an afternoon. I’d like to tell you I won’t watch it… but it’s going to be a hell of a game.
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K.B. Ruess is a frustrated athlete who was cursed with a terribly un-athletic body. He was forced to take a working stiff job, but spends his spare time writing on his blog at Sportsbent. He can also be found on Twitter at @Sportsbent.