Ty Cobb Article

[redietz]

Charles Leerhsen has an eye-opening article regarding the legendary Ty Cobb at http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-wa...w-thats-wrong/

The article is stunning from a journalistic viewpoint in that it demonstrates how most of what has become "public knowledge" regarding Ty Cobb was generated from just a couple of people with their own agendas and shortcomings as journalists. It turns out the most quoted anecdotes involving Cobb could not be traced to original sources.

The story oft related of Cobb fighting with three different black men, when traced to source materials, was revealed to be incorrect, as the three men mentioned were white.

The lessons from this piece are startling. Without documentation or interviews with original sources, a couple of writers were able to promulgate completely incorrect Cobb info across the decades. The writers did not even read some of the original reports from the papers in which they were published.

The article really underlines how journalists with particular biases or agendas can popularize or demonize people, despite having no objective evidence to back up their storytelling.

Definitely worth the read.

[Rob.Singer]

Anyone have an autographed To Cobb baseball?

Those would be the only folks who care about this story.

[redietz]

I don't know, Rob. The issue of a journalists hyping or demonizing a person without having read source materials and without objective evidence has a certain relevance, wouldn't you say? It's often misleading to the public when one or two journalists throw their weight behind or against someone and a mythology is created.

[Dan Druff]

Link you posted was incorrect. Just fixed it.

For those that like the articles on imprimis.hillsdale.edu, you can get their publication sent to you in printed form. They send out like 2 million of them for free each time one comes out.

[Alan Mendelson]

I don't know, Rob. The issue of a journalists hyping or demonizing a person without having read source materials and without objective evidence has a certain relevance, wouldn't you say? It's often misleading to the public when one or two journalists throw their weight behind or against someone and a mythology is created.

Journalists are human. And what about entire news organizations? They make mistakes too. I think they throw around some weight as well.