No, I think the point was more that Outkick is a shoddy operation which concerns itself more with fighting culture wars than producing quality journalism.
Directly from their mission statement:
“Questioning the consensus and exposing the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism, OutKick is the antidote to the mainstream sports media that often serves an elite, left-leaning minority instead of the American sports fan.”
Thank you for posting Outkick's mission statement. It provides a basis for your animus, and it gives me greater insight into what would therefore far more likely represent a conscious choice, undoubtedly at an editorial level, to substitute the fabricated term "garbage parents" and therby create an attention-grabbing headline that would align with objectives at a publisher's level toward advancing business objectives.
Without any prior experience with or background on Outkick, I instantly recognized the deception and labeled the headline both "dishonest" and "garbage," but my opinion that the video interview was wide-ranging and well-conducted remains undisturbed.
Ironically, the information you've provided "awakened" me to the sinister nature of the substituted language, and such actions to alert people to such institutional manipulations is at the heart of any consciousness-raising activities. I say "ironically" without self-satisfied approval.
Consciousness-raising is foundational to societal advancement by exposing forces that would prefer to resist such advancement by demonizing such efforts, whereby raised consciousness is deemed as something negative by forces who would feel threatened by social change to include more beneficiaries and a greater number of stakeholders & a wider spectrum of leadership beyond those more dedicated to protecting those already doing well with things as they are. (Consider here a rise in efforts to recast diversity, equity, and inclusion as something negative, now that it's packaged and promoted as DEI, with funded initiatives and programming, and additional opportunities for misproportioned actions and responses across the embattled turf).
At the tension points, a broadened perspective gets slurred as "political correctness," awakening to historical patterns within the development & perpetuation of institutional & societal norms cynically appropriates a linguistic term from black academia and transforms "woke" also into a slur by mocking sympathetic, so-called "left-leaning elites" along the way (even where some components may be mockable or dubious in other ways). So yes, it is a counteroffensive in ongoing culture wars that have "the American sports fan" set up as the victim of troublemakers who must be discredited by a countering elite right-leaning minority that does its best to disguise itself as something that does not exist.
In that sense, I can see Outlook more as you and
@speckle are claiming, without
necessarily agreeing that I or Dan Hurley have been "duped," though it may rise to having similar effect broadly by virtue of the power of headlines to shape a low-information society, with both active and passive motivating forces to remain that way.
One more set of reasons to hope I die before I get old old, which is no help to you.
A last afternote: "Hopefully" and other such adverbs truly do get used incorrectly in The Boneyard and elsewhere.
