Walking the Line

Members of the media and Red Sox bloggers have had a tough time over the last month for different reasons. Let’s start with the mainstream media:

Members of the press have had to report upon a disastrous free fall of almost historic per-portions.  They had to come up with new ways of telling a story about a team that simply was not producing. If they called out any player they would be seen as too negative and risked the wrath of Red Sox Nation in the comment section of their story or through a rash of unfollows on Twitter.  Players on the team would stop answering their questions and become openly hostile to them like Lackey was in last night’s press conference.   If the reporter was too generous to the team they got labeled as a water carrier for John Henry and a “pink hat.” The “no rooting from the press box” rule is hard to follow when you have the audience pulling you in different directions

Red Sox bloggers have had a slightly different problem. They are super fans and do not hide their bias when they cover the team. When they report something negative about the team they are labeled with not being a true fan or even called, as I was earlier this week, a “bandwagon fan.” This makes for a difficult line to walk.

The Red Sox showed they can still pull a few rabbits out of the hat with last night’s win against the Yankees so Red Sox Nation will be a little less critical of the messenger today. Winning will cure the slightly tarnished relationship. I can only hope that people will soon be framing newspaper covers announcing the Red Sox as the 2011 World Series Champions even if they do not like the reporters who wrote the stories inside the papers.