Do You Have Confidence In The Media?

As many readers of this contribution realize, I was in Las Vegas last week when the Sean Foley to Team Tiger story broke and behind the smoke and mirrors, it appears to be nothing more than a tempest in a teapot right now, but we’ll see what happens.

At this point, there are denials from IMG, which represents Woods, and Foley himself, but that’s standard in these situations. Meanwhile, the big man himself was at Sawgrass over the weekend trying to get his career back on track before withdrawing with a neck injury at The Players Championship and hadn’t chimed in on the subject as of this writing.

“I have not talked to Tiger about coaching in any form whatsoever,” Foley said in a release.

Here’s what he said to Lorne Rubenstein of The Globe and Mail:

“It’s typical media stuff. They write whatever reality they want to create. I’ve said ‘no comment’ to anybody who has asked me about this. The same people I say this to write blogs that I’m going to work with Tiger.”

“Who knows what will happen? I’d like to work with Tiger if I got a chance, sure. Is there an interest? Absolutely there is. But again, there’s been no discussion at all at this point.”

The typical media stuff comment is one that you hear a lot these days. On the other hand, I’ve seen smoke on a story doused by denials from the people involved only to start burning again as the alleged fiction became fact, so I get why media is quick to jump on such stories.

The Canadian golf media has proliferated in the past 15 years. Back then, ScoreGolf (then known as Score Magazine) was the only national publication and there were, of course, golf columnists for various newspapers across the land, as well as some strong regional publications and other radio/TV presentations.

During the golf boom of the mid-to-late 1990s, the number of golf publications continued to grow and that was compounded by the growth of the Internet where golf bloggers were added to the mix. These days, media is an ultra-competitive business for both content and, ultimately, a piece of already-stretched ad budgets.

That’s why media is so quick to jump all over breaking stories, but you do so at the risk of your credibility.

That may be the reason for the results of a current poll on cpga.com, which asks “Who Are Your Favourite Canadian PGA Radio Show Guests?”

Listeners of that show, which runs on GNN, understandably favoured PGA club professionals, who had earned 42.86 per cent of the votes as of Friday, followed by tour pros at 33.33 per cent.

Of the five categories, media members were dead last at zero per cent, behind non-golf celebrities at 19.05 per cent and association executives at 4.76 per cent.

That could just mean media folks are just plain boring, but whatever the reason, it’s apparent that the golf industry, in particular, is hardly clamouring to hear what the media has to say.

That leads us to a spinoff in this week’s GNN Poll.

How many columnists/bloggers/commentators do you attach significant credibility to from the Canadian media?

Jump over to the GNN Poll on the home page to cast your vote and please feel free to talk about who you trust in the media and the state of the Canadian golf media in the comment box below.

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