The media in regards to any business/industry/sport is only able to affect change in one of two ways. Either unearth/prove corruption which is not such an easy thing to do or cause strong public reaction with reporting of controversial issue which forces a reaction from the business/industry/sport. Racing media is for the most part toothless where it even exists. There are few mainstream papers covering racing outside the T. Crown/B. Cup and of those that do the NY Daily news and Times are both manned by buffoons who believe themselves far smarter and in tune with what is going on than the actually they are. Paulick is pretty hopeless as the Lexington blue blood crowd is what he fancies and they are totally out to lunch. Who else is there?
The sad reality is what Tom is complaining about is not only completely valid but a far greater threat to the health of the sport than most of the other ancillary nonsense combined. Sure no one really cares about Penn National outside of those that are racing there and the tiny group of players that bets that product but the perception of corruption is not unique to the small trcks.
I was sitting at MTH with a bunch of guys playing on Sat in handicapping tourney there. A lot of serious players who bet a pretty good amount of money, some with a good feel for the realities of the game and some just good handicappers. And when Belmont runs a 3 horse race on a Sat card they all just chuckle and wonder aloud why on a Sat would this race be carded? But the real rumbling starts when Serey's horse in the 3rd runs off the screen. The horse figured in the race but the reemergence of Serey and the unveiling of Ramon Moya, Sr. who wins another race later in the card which gives him close to 50% win % for the year (training for a group of ex Carlos Guerrero owners which of course isnt lost on anyone) just drives most of these guys crazy. The thing is that every trainer on a hot streak isnt juiced and every horse that reverses form isnt because of drugs but because these things and people are allowed to go unchecked AND there seems to be little to no response from track management or the state regulators or stewards or horseman organizations the PERCEPTION is that cheating is allowed which implicates pretty much all of us in the business. The idea that a lot of horsemen arent skeptical and tired in a lot of cases of Jamie Ness is wrong. Alot of owners have left or cut down a lot because of the juice guys but they dont leave with much fanfare. They just leave and when there are empty stalls at tracks with pretty good purses the industry consensus (almost always wrong by the way) is that there is a horse shortage when there most certainly are plenty of horses in this country but a distinct lack of new people to buy and race them. The reasons that so many people are dead wrong about so much in this business is they are so willing to go along with something that sounds plausible as opposed to actually doing a bit of critical thinking or looking up the facts. The idea that Ness is just a better horseman is laughable in the way that Madoff was just a superior money manager. The idea that the business needs younger people is so off base because the age of the people we need to target is insignificant to a huge number of factors that should be far more important like "is there a good chance that they will bet". Perhaps we can blame the racing media for being lazy for the most part, yeah but there just arent enough of them to make a difference even if they werent for the most part so inept.
I cant reiterate strongly enough that there are very few people in leadership positions in this business that really have any grasp of the issues, have any understanding of what the customers in the grandstand or backside want and any temerity to ever deal with anything other than what is directly in front of them.
When some of your biggest customers are standing up and injecting the air with imaginary syringes when your leading trainers are winning races....well what else is there to say about your product?
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