It seems every time I turned on a sports show or hit a sports website over the weekend I was reading about Terrell Owens actually showing up to the Cowboys mini-camp. And these weren’t “he was injured but must be doing okay” articles, they were “I bet you are surprised at who actually showed up” articles.

I thought it was bad enough that he, among several other wide-receivers, had a hamstring injury last year but, quite unlike those other wide receivers, he received national day-by-day coverage on it. Now the guy can’t even show up for practice without it making headlines!

I’ll admit, I am not a big T.O. fan. I didn’t want him to become a Dallas Cowboy. I wouldn’t care if he was cut tomorrow. But, I must admit that I detest how misrepresented the guy seems to be in the media. Granted, some of it is his own doing, but do we really need to act surprised that a guy known for a strong work ethic actually showed up to practice?

Let me repeat that: Terrell Owens is known for having a strong work ethic. No one denies that. The media doesn’t write about how he’s lazy, how he doesn’t work out in the off season, etc. It’s one of the few things he is praised on — but that certainly doesn’t stop the media from acting surprised that this hard worker is willing to show up and practice. Not if such a story will sell newspapers (generate website hits) in a time of the year where only the rare football story is likely to get much notice.

There is a lesson to be learned here, a lesson I learned back in college when a (very good) teacher asked us to write two different articles on the presidential debates showing that night — one article slanted for one candidate and the other slanted for the other candidate. The instructions were explicit: Tell the truth. And omit just enough of the truth to slant it one way or the other.

In other words, don’t believe everything you read. The media likes to blow things out of proportion, just as they blew T.O.’s hamstring injury out of proportion, and just as recent articles are an over-reaction to something that should be expected of any veteran that isn’t a NY Giant or didn’t attend Miami University.

The truth is T.O. is not the monster the media sometimes makes him out to be. Oh, there’s some truth in T.O. the monster, to be sure. It was certainly T.O. that was riding his quarterback during that game (and you can insert several different quarterbacks and several different games into that sentence). But, the media does have a tendency to look at sales as much (perhaps more) than they look at truth, and so the media has a tendency to blow up the negative side of T.O. and laying low on the positive side.

This is why T.O. actually showing up to camp makes headline news on Yahoo.Com, and T.O. having a hamstring injury makes headline news across the country, but T.O. staying after practice to help out rookie free agent Sam Hurd was mostly just a local story. Who wants to read about T.O. the good guy?