It’s not nearly enough for Curt Schilling that Gary Thorne (“an awesome hockey announcer”) has been exposed as less than credible, nor does no. 38 take much satisfaction in his October ’04 heroics being recounted in the papers over and over again. Instead, while offering a one million dollar donation to charity(!) if anyone can prove his bloody sock wasn’t 4REAL, Boston’s foremost Everquest enthusiast / Republican Schill uses his 38 Pitches blog to tar much of the print and broadcast media with the same (bloody) brush.

Take Gary Thorne, John, Jack Joe or whatever his first name is, Heyman, Karen Vescey, Woody Paige, CHB, Jay Marriotti, Bill Plaschke, and a host of other people that litter the media landscape, and put them all on an island somewhere.Does anyone stop reading their newspapers? Watching the shows they appear on? The answer to that is no. Instead of using the forums they participate in to do something truly different, change lives, inspire people, you have an entire subset of media whose sole purpose in life is to actually be the news, instead of report it. They have little to no talent at what they do and other than a mastery of the English language their skill sets are non-existent.

Watching Woody Paige or the plastered made up face of Jay Marriotti spew absolutely nothing of merit on sports, day after day, makes it easy to understand how Gary Thorne could say something as stupid, ignorant, and uninformed as he did the other night.

If you haven™t figured it out by now, working in the media is a pretty nice gig. Barring outright plagiarism or committing a crime, you don™t have to be accountable if you don™t want to. You can say what you want when you want and you don™t really have to answer to anyone. You can always tell the bigger culprits by the fact you never see their faces in the clubhouse. Most of them are afraid to show themselves to the subjects they rail on everyday.

So Gary Thorne says that Doug told him the blood was fake. Which even when he™s called out he can™t admit he lied. Doug never told Gary Thorne anything. Gary Thorne overheard something and then misreported what he overheard. Not only did he misreport it, he misinterpreted what he misreported.

Without dismissing Schilling’s right to take umbrage at Thorne’s comments, this particular salvo at Masarroti, Page, Shaugnessey and Plaschke is pretty unsophisticated, even by Curt’s standards. Perhaps the quartet aren’t nearly as committed to “reporting the news” as Curt would like because they paid to express their opinions rather than merely provide the game story. Whether or not any of the above have much to offer in that regard, is another subject, but I think Schilling is missing the point here. If Thorne’s accusations were without evidence, he’s up shit creek and deservedly so (though again, this wouldn’t be the first time someone challenged Doug Mirabelli’s account of something). But that has little, if anything to do with print journalists who routinely mock Schilling’s egomania.