Today has been quite a spectacle if your an Arsenal fan and you like to peruse though the headlines. Everything "crisis" to players wanting out, it's everywhere. And this is why I'm writing this post.

It's not meant to be a dig on anyone, but more of an advocation for the means of "just calming the fuck down" and settling in. We see these kinds of headlines every year, every month, every week, "Wenger rips on media", "Player-X says Jack is perfect for their team", "Player-Z wants bigger contract", etc. And as someone who blogs and constantly goes though the sick mess that is ESPN for some simple news, it's never going to stop, this is the "new media", and everybody is dying to get their hands on a piece of the pie first.

What I'm saying is, when you read up something that is posted on Soccernet, the Independent, the Sun, the Guardian, Sky, even the BBC that's Arsenal related... it doesn't even have to be Arsenal related, it can be anything really, just automatically take it with a grain of salt. I'm not saying I haven't bought into anything myself, I used to do the same thing and still occasionally do, I get ahead of myself sometimes, and I, or anyone really just shouldn't do that. And it can be anyone, hell even one of our most reliable sources, Jamie Sanderson, bit hard into the "M'Vila to Arsenal" story this summer and we all followed suit just for it to completely blow up in the end and leave us, especially Jamie, eating humble pie.

The biggest example I can provide for this is Deadspin's awful attempt at taking the Manti Te'o hoax story and trying to turn it into an accusation. If you read the whole story when it first emerged, you were probably as shocked as I was, I didn't even know what to think at first, and it took a couple of weeks before I finally came back down to the ground. I do give Deadspin some props for the original research of that story, they were the one's who originally looked into all the questions that we didn't bother with. Who is this Lennay Kekua? Why haven't we heard from any of her relatives? What about anyone from Stanford? Where's her death certificate and why isn't there an original local story on it? And they answered it all. The problem was that, Deadspin immediately turned it into a smear campaign, drawing the attention of just about anyone who keeps up with college football and even sports in general, and while the facts are out there now, the damage has already been done and there's no fixing that. Journalism at it's finest really...

So what I'm saying is, if you see something like "Walcott being pushed by United players to join", don't jump into it right away and go beserk about it, because the more people that bite into it, the faster it's going to spread, like wildfire, and then not only does it make us look like idoits for believing it right away, the player and the team become affected by the fact that they start getting asked questions about it constantly, to the point where mindsets become jarred and chaos erupts around something that some midlander in Liverpool wrote for the Sun, just because he wanted some added attention.

There's no doubt that that's the world we live in now, and it's probably not going to change for the better as far as proper journalism goes, but on an individual level, we can try ourselves to weed out the bad information and hold out for the correct information. It's like the text you get from a friend saying so and so's girlfriend hooked up with this random guy, and you really don't think about how he know's it for sure, your just ready to jump to the conclusion that that girl isn't as good as she appears, and you think about that person different from now on, whether it's true or not. It's like high school all over again, and it's sad that as adults, we're doing the same damn mistakes we should have learned from years ago...