Kentucky Wildcats Basketball: BigBlueHistory.net Adds 2010 Media Section

As most of you know, Jon Scott is the historian of Kentucky basketball, and his site, BigBlueHistory.net is an invaluable treasure to every fan of the Blue and White. What Jon has done is create a repository for a great deal of Kentucky basketball history, and it is a resource I consult on a regular basis for information and analysis.

Jon has just launched a new page on the site called 2010 - A Media Odyssey, and it is a tremendous resource for facts, informed opinion, and analysis of some of the major Kentucky Wildcats basketball stories of 2010, of which there were an inordinate number.

Jon shines a light on some of Kentucky fans' most disliked media figures, such as Pete Thamel, Pat Forde, and of course, Michael O'Brien of the Chicago Sun-Times, who famously broke arguably the most unethical report in the history of Kentucky basketball, the false rumor about Anthony Davis being paid $200,000 for his college commitment.

This page is absolutely chock full of interesting compilations and factual analysis. Here is just a small taste of a couple of his articles:

Regarding a column in the Boston Globe referring to the scrum between Kentucky's DeMarcus Cousins and Jared Swopshire of the Louisville Cardinals back in the 2009-10 season:

I contacted managing editor of the Globe, Martin Baron. In my email to him, I mentioned the following: "Note that I'm not disputing that the play in question was rough (Cousins and Swopshire were on the ground fighting for a ball when Swopshire kneed Cousins in the head and Cousins turned his forearm toward Swopshire's head), nor that Cousins was innocent, shouldn't have received a technical, etc. nor that the issue of Cousins' maturity is not a question for NBA scouts. Those are all fair questions. What I do object to is the claim that a punch was thrown, which is entirely false. In other words, Mr. Washburn does not have to include a blatant lie to make his point. (A lie that no doubt other lazy journalists will pick up and repeat for years to come.)

Regarding the series of stories in the New York Times by Pete Thamel regarding Eric Bledsoe's grades in high school:

Despite the claims made by the newspapers, it soon became apparent that Bledsoe's 'grade report' they had obtained and revealed in their stories was not the final grade for the course, but an intermediate mark. This detail was something that was not well explained in the articles. As with the original stories, neither Soloman nor Thamel explained where the 'grade report' came from, nor commented on the willingness of whoever their source was in breaking FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] laws.

There is much, much more of interest here, including compilations of the accounts of various sources into a coherent narrative that helps the reader gain an in-depth understanding of each of these media failures, as well as a reasonably objective "grade" for each media source utilizing their own ethical and performance standards in each case.

This is a must-read for all Kentucky fans who closely follow the media, or the merely interested who were never sure what the fuss was about here in Kentucky. Jon ties it all together in an understandable way wraps it up neatly for you with an nice Christmas bow.

Do yourself a favor, and read the whole thing.