Sports on My Mind is one of the better sports blogs/sites around in my opinion and often focuses on race in the sports media, which is of course a topic the mainstream media rarely tackles with much conviction. In fact, the site was the only one that I could find (besides EWC) that strongly came out against the “take him in the back alley and lynch him” comments by golf commentator Kelly Tilghman.

Recently MODI, who used to write the great blog Cosellout, which was folded into Sports on My Mind earlier this year, wrote a very provocative piece entitled Sports & Hitler Pt. 1: Media Hit-Job on Jemele Hill, which looks at the media outcry and coverage of ESPN columnist Jemele Hill, who in a column written during the NBA playoffs wrote that rooting ”for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim.”

Here’s the intro to the story:

She was suspended by ESPN for a week, and rational thought was suspended even longer. On talk radio she was called “hypocritical bitch!” and “dumb broad!”… by email she was called the “n-word” many times over… and by telephone she was harassed at her home. These were some of the responses Jemele Hill received after recently stating that rooting “for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim.” Was the Hill backlash in response to anti-Semitism? Or anti-Celticism? Or more than that?…

 The argument here is that Hill’s invoking Hitler to make a point about the Celtics was inexcusable — but so was the media’s reaction. A later piece, written by DWil compares what Hill wrote to what Bonnie Bernstein recently said on the ESPN’s The Starting Five, which essentially aligned and compared “Palestinian suicide bombers” and “young talented basketball players.”

Secondarily, the unleavened one was let off the hook by the same columnists who bashed Hill; columnists such as the Boston Herald’s Paul Baronofsky and Joe Fitzgerald. With Hill, Baronofsky called for her to be fired. As MODI reported in his Hill piece, the Herald also summoned venerable Fitzgerald to provide us with a tear-jerker of a column replete with a Holocaust survivor’s story (sorry that the Herald is so cash desperate that article written beyond a week ago now costs cash to fully access).

About Berstein they wrote…

Bupkis.

No message boards lit up with Anti-Bernstaein rants but the AOL hicknecks filled the Fanhouse with either venomous pro-Israeli-Jew-Bernstein comments or with apologies begging for “context” and wishes to excuse Bernstein in response to the Michael David Smith blogpost admonishing the ESPN sideline interviewer and sometime reporter.

There are some great points being made in both pieces. Please go read them.