Distrust just nature of the business
We take this truth to be self-evident: The truth is in the ears of the beholder.
So it's amusing that Bears general manager Jerry Angelo is upset because the local media tends to not take him at his word.
Few sparring partners are as polarized as sports figures and sports journalists. They rank with liberals and conservatives, defense attorneys and prosecutors, Cubs fans and White Sox fans, car salesmen and car customers.
A team's best interest is to withhold information and a news agency's is to expose it. When Angelo says this is what he was thinking when the Bears acquired rookie Chris Williams' health history, the media is obligated to wonder what he really was thinking.
Journalists simply don't believe sports figures. Readers don't believe journalists. A newspaper reader's wife doesn't believe his explanation of the lipstick on his collar. Her children don't believe her view of teenage romance.
And so it goes, with everybody presumed to be deceitful until proven honest.
Now we have the general manager of another Chicago sports team bothered because his veracity is questioned.
A couple of months ago Cubs GM Jim Hendry engaged in a heated exchange with a local columnist over whose version of the truth was valid. This week Angelo conducted a media conference call to defend his credibility.
That's what the game within the games has come to, folks.
Journalists are wary of alleged truths after being lied to so often on so many subjects by so many people in so many sports.
Nothing should be accepted as true just because someone says it is. As the saying goes, if your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Angelo now, Hendry before him, and all the rest gave us no reason to doubt their credibility other than they're human like the rest of us are and their lips move like the rest of ours move.
Trust me - OK, don't trust me - reporters are jittery now because of criticism that baseball's steroids scandal wasn't investigated more intensely.
Maybe the criticism is justified, maybe not, but it hangs out there like a storm cloud waiting to rain all over us again. So when somebody says it's daytime, it's incumbent upon us to remove our shades to check the sun's whereabouts.
Meanwhile, the Angelos and the Hendrys have reason to distrust journalists because so often the truth has been tweaked and twisted in print or on the air.
You would think the truth is absolute. Something either is or isn't true, right? No, today the truth depends on source, circumstance and interpretation.
Did the Bears misjudge the severity of Williams' back problems in college? Did they take too big a gamble in drafting him? Will they pay for this mistake for years to come?
Depends on whom you talk to, and a good reporter can find any number of reliable sources to confirm whatever premise he or she wants to confirm.
One problem Angelo has is so many others pollute the NFL that he's operating in a league that makes China seem transparent.
Is anybody going to blindly believe anything anyone in Bill Belichick's business says?
Much less anything you read or hear in the media?