Tiger's Indefinite Leave Clippings, New Year's Eve Edition

I continue to be confounded by WESH 2's report quoting Sgt. Kim Montes about Tiger's interview with police almost a month after the FHP said it was done talking about the case. WESH reporter Bob Keeling's on air report can be seen here, and in it are a few more quotes from Montes about Tiger's condition and the rumor mill:

"The only thing we noticed was a fat lip."

"No other facial injuries…no reason to believe he was the victim of domestic violence."

"All these rumors of these injuries are false."

As for the source that gave the chain email rebutted by the FHP credibility, Furman Bisher has filed what Deadspin called an "adorable" follow-up blog post. Bisher writes:

It was not intended for anybody but those who are plugged into my blog—which is free of charge. No subscription charges are involved. Since I retired from daily columning, I simply like to write a few things now and then, and stay in touch with friends, and pass on information from trusted sources. Anybody else who got it is an intruder, no friend of mine. God knows, how 43,000+ people who have nothing to do but peep in on such an insignificant website as mine irritates me.

That, I suppose, illustrates my electronic illiteracy.

Pretty much.

But, if you are among the offended, then stay off my website. It’s for friends only.

Someone just made his treehouse off limits to the other kids in the neighborhood!

No less absurd in the electronic illiteracy department is former Golfweek editor and now amateur blogger Dave Seanor lashing out at "amateur bloggers" for picking up Bisher's post and alerting the world to the idiotic chain email.

As with most bloggers – including Examiners – his prose is not edited. Forget the fact-checking aspect. In this case, an editor’s touch for nuance would have served Furman well, introducing the email pass-along as amusing parody and nothing more. But it wasn’t positioned as such, was picked up by amateur bloggers eager (read desperate) to fill space during a quiet holiday week.

Mind you he files this on Examiner, one of the great purveyors of internet junk where bloggers are paid by the hit. Please, continue digging...

Of course, those bloggers aren’t subject to editing filters, either, so the post continued to be passed off as “news,” when in fact the only news value to it was the traction it gained in the blogosphere.

Had Seanor clicked on the very links under his own post he would have noted that it was Deadspin--most definitely not an amateur blog--that first alerted the world to the ridiculousness of the chain email and later pointed out the absurdity of Bisher claiming it to be credible. He then links to amateur bloggers like Ryan Ballengee, Stephanie Wei and yours truly who in our own unique ways pointed out the problem with the email that Bisher suggested was credible.  None of the "amateur bloggers" Seanor attempts to implicate as mainstream purveyors of the chain email ever attempted to pass it off as news.

No, the blame would go to the person who initially wrote it, the discussion board it was posted on and the 30 million or so who passed it around. But only Mr. Bisher had the credibility and audacity to pass it off as newsworthy.

Iliana Limón in the Orlando Sentinel files a more thoughtful analysis of the chain email's impact and offers this from Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute:

Like Snopes.com's co-founder, McBride cautioned against buying into the rumors without verification.

"I think professional journalists have a responsibility to bring another level of scrutiny to the e-mail," she said. "Can you name the original source? Can you confirm the origination of the information? If you can't do either of those, the information is suspicious."

Ryan Ballengee will always remember 2009 as the holiday that he spent picking apart a UC Davis study on the economic impact of Tiger's accident and fallout, concluding pretty impressively that there is "no direct corollary between Woods' actions and the movement of stocks."

And we'll leave the last word to Scott Michaux, who comes to Tiger's defense:

But this notion that Woods held himself up as some sort of perfect human specimen is ludicrous. Show me a single one of those Accenture, Gillette, Buick, Nike or Tag Heuer ads that includes his wife or children. Name one time that he ever volunteered any private-life insight other than the cliched responses to oft-repeated questions that were lifted from the boiler plate that any one of us would use regardless of our own marital or parental discord/bliss.

Woods never flaunted his family life in the way that Phil Mickelson does. That's no besmirch on Mickelson. That's simply who Mickelson is. His professional and private lives are intertwined like nobody else's.

Tiger has never tried to be like Phil. He's never apologized for his salty outbursts. He's never held his family up as the model. He's never tried to be Gandhi.

Woods' single-minded public focus has been to be nothing more than the greatest golfer who ever lived. And in that mission he has yet to fail.