SNY plays both sides on Omar Minaya, Adam Rubin Incident

Just as Omar Minaya turned on Adam Rubin, surreally making life even more miserable for the Mets, the network showed the Mets’ GM on one side of the screen and the flabbergasted reporter on the other.

This was just after Rubin had appeared on SNY as a correspondent discussing the pending firing of Tony Bernazard, and before he again appeared on the network, calling Minaya’s actions “devastating to me” and a “low blow” and adding, “They just made my job impossible to do for the short term.”

The latter comments came on “Daily News Live,” a staple of SNY’s schedule since 2006.

Did I mention SNY mostly is owned by the Mets?

See, these days trying to disentangle reporters’ conflicted professional allegiances is more difficult than ever, often leading only to a house of mirrors.

Example: Jon Heyman, who appeared in SNY’s studio after Minaya’s news conference, works for both Sports Illustrated and MLB.com, as does Tom Verducci, who recently wrote a best-selling book with Joe Torre.

As Verducci said when I asked him about the Torre story, in the end the only thing a modern journalist can do is fall back on his or her integrity, without which we’re all really out of business.

And that is the crux of the bitter he said-he said confrontation between Rubin and Minaya.
connections

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* Nadya Suleman Nadya Suleman
* Arnold Schwarzenegger Arnold Schwarzenegger

If you believe Minaya that Rubin “lobbied” the organization for a job, then as a beat writer, he crossed the line. (After the news conference, Minaya apologized for using an improper forum to raise the issue, but not for the content.)

If you believe Rubin that he merely made general inquiries about how to go about pursuing a job in player personnel, he did nothing wrong.

Sports history is full of writers-turned-executives, from American League founder Ban Johnson to former baseball commissioner Ford Frick to former Giants GM Ernie Accorsi to dozens of others.

(The world – sports and otherwise – is even more full of former journalists who morphed into paid spokespeople for entities they once covered.)

Rubin is a 35-year-old in an increasingly tenuous profession, and expecting him not to keep his eyes, ears and options open is unfair and unrealistic.

It’s up to the Daily News to decide whether this makes it impossible for him to cover the Mets, but let’s face it: His reputation suffered less than that of Minaya, who now has retired the trophy as the most ill-at-ease news conference emcee in sports.

Not surprisingly, Minaya’s latest debacle was lambasted by hosts and callers on both WFAN – which carries the Mets – and 1050 ESPN, whose Michael Kay also works for the Yankees’ YES Network.

SNY, too, didn’t shy away from criticizing the general manager, if not ownership.

Kevin Burkhardt called Minaya’s performance “kinda nutty” and game announcers Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez took turns lamenting what had occurred.

“I find it kind of hard to believe that Adam Rubin was brought into this,” Hernandez said.

Said Darling: “It’s an awful day here in Met-land.”

Taken from NewsDay.Com