Major League Baseball has been extremely tone deaf when it comes to how its audience consumes its product. The generation of younger fans are glued to their cell phones, making it silly that MLB cracks down so hard on GIFs and Vines that make their product seem more appealing to a generation viewing everything through a smartphone screen. No one leaves home without their cell phone these days, and those phones are used to instantly create memories with a camera at sporting events and around everyday life. 
 
 The older generation seems to think this is somehow detracting from the natural enjoyment of life and take the time to criticize the practice at seemingly every opportunity. It's a generational divide that comes across as bitter and superior. Couple that generational divide with a stereotype that young women are at games to be seen for Instagram, or because their boyfriends dragged them there against their will instead of "being a good fan" by hanging on every pitch and you have the fuel for a mean-spirited rant. Arizona Diamondbacks announcers Bob Brenly and Steve Berthiaume decided to perpetuate this stereotype when they took two minutes to mock a group of women taking selfies at the ballpark during the fourth inning of Wednesday's game. 
 
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 Having a group of women taken to task by the broadcast booth during a meaningless game in late September for enjoying themselves is pretty silly. Presumably these women paid for a ticket, just like anyone else in attendance, and didn't seem to be bothering anyone by snapping photos with their phones of their silly faces and giant churros, yet the television booth decided they were worthy of ridicule because they happened to be on their phones instead of using that time to watch every single minute of a nine-inning game. Welcome to 2015, gentlemen. Everyone is on their phone all the time. Baseball is a game with a lot of breaks and using that downtime to capture a fun moment with your friends shouldn't make you the topic of a two-minute call-out. It just makes you a human in the 21st century. 
 
 Ironically, this mockery took place right as the broadcast team was pitching the T-Mobile Fan Photo promotion that encouraged fans to send in their pictures from the ballpark to be used on the broadcast. The promotion exists because people take their phones to game and snap photos of themselves, their friends, and their family enjoying the game. This group of women were doing just that. They paid for their ticket and seemed to be having a great time with one another. That's what everyone should get out of a baseball game. Why would anyone want to participate in this promotion if they know they might be mocked for it? 
 
 I asked some of my colleagues in the sports world what they thought of the video. This is what they had to say. 
 
 Crapping on the interests and habits of young women is such a tired practice. Young women's interests are so often regarded as silly, frivolous, and worthy of scorn. Women are taught to feel shame in such a broad variation of ways, and it's frustrating that last night's edition was over something most everyone I know does: Take a damn selfie at a baseball game. God forbid someone of any gender or age create documentation of a social event. What I think is complicated, though, is that I can't seem to sort out how much of this broadcast segment was about gender versus generation. I think they're inextricably wound up in this case, and I can't make up my mind if young men doing the same would have earned as much attention from the booth. On its face, the image is pretty funny: A handful of teenagers just being teenagers, exemplifying one small facet of adolescent life in such a saturated way. 
 
 My first reaction when I saw the video was exasperation because I knew what the response would be from the masses. And they have not disappointed me in that respect. I do not like how it is now assumed that groups of young girls only go to games to take selfies of themselves and of their food, and that they don't pay attention to baseball. I also don't like that the broadcasters were mocking the girls. It seems like the easy thing to do and they probably should have taken the high road. And finally, I'm almost positive that if a TV camera found a bunch of frat guys doing the same exact thing, they never would have been shown or mocked on TV. 
 
 Young girls and women are always the target of attacks, saying that they’re vain or obsessed with their phones. I feel like that’s completely unfair to them and lumps them into this "ditzy, carefree, shallow" mindset. Yes, they’re at a game — shouldn’t that be enough for some people? They went to a game! They’re having fun! Why take away from young girls and women having fun at a game? If they want to take selfies, that’s totally their thing and they should be able to do it. Maybe they want to remember the game with a selfie — who’s to say they shouldn’t? 
 
 Well, it's creepy how the camera pans back and forth across the girls for what feels like forever. Secondarily, there's a really patronizing tone to the comments - "300th picture they've taken of themselves today" what? They paid for those tickets. They paid for those (probably absurdly overpriced) food items. Why not take a picture with it? Why not send that photo in to the Strongest Fan Photo? Do these announcers not know that a lot of the submissions they get for that are selfies? (Of course they do, but it's more fun to make fun of college-aged young women, because HAHA look at these girls and their self confidence). I'd like to know how many times they made their photographer re-shoot the headshot for the team website. 
 
 People have been creating images of themselves for the entirety of the history of people and images. If Vincent Van Gogh could have made a self-portrait in seconds, any time he wanted, he probably would have. These young women may not be taking in a ballgame in the same way as a die-hard fan would, but so what? They're at the game. They could have celebrated sisterhood anywhere else, rather than a late-September game between two eliminated teams. Judging by all the empty seats around them, plenty of people made that choice. 
 
 "Look at the one on the right," we're instructed, in a command that sounds like we're looking at pumpkins rather than humans. It is 2015; perhaps the time is right to stop treating selfie-takers like a side show. Also it does not help your case when your problem with selfies is that "I can't even get my phone to take pictures!" 
 
 MLB seems to have trouble connecting with young fans, who like to use their phones. Our SB Nation friends (at Beyond the Box Score) wrote just this week about MLBAM's backwards efforts to stamp out fan-generated game clips, and this selfie-bashing commentary is cut from the same cloth. I don't feel outraged by this commentary, per se, but I do feel tired of the old guard of baseball industry veterans refusing to yield any piece of their space to a generation that doesn't act or look like them. 
 
 The thing that strikes me most when watching the announcers for the Diamondbacks poke fun at the women taking selfies at a baseball game is that it's just plain mean spirited. It's got a touch of "get off my lawn" and a hint of "girls are preoccupied with looks", put together to mock a group of women who are having fun and not hurting anyone. Have some of us mocked people doing silly things like that at sporting events before? Sure. And that was mean too, but we're not on TV. And now this group of women, who just had a great time at a baseball game, will see a video that mocks them when their only crime was having fun in a different way than the older men in the broadcast booth. With every study agreeing MLB needs to find a way to engage new, younger fans, that's a shame. 
 
 What do they think they’re accomplishing here? That’s what I keep coming back to. I wish that the camera serving as an obvious proxy for the male gaze was new. I wish that announcers and color commentary guys ogling women, sometimes of disturbingly ambiguous ages (read: they look very, very young), as a team comes back from a half inning or a pitching change, was remotely arresting. But it just isn’t at this point. These women (can we please stop calling them girls?) transgressed some line of proper fandom for the men in the booth. They were trivial or disinterested or silly. Was the booth trying to make a point about having our noses buried in our rather than watching the game? Maybe. But if they were, they very quickly pivoted to a conversation made up almost entirely of gendered understandings of vanity. So what were they trying to do? I’m not sure. But I know what they did, and what they did was shame a bunch of young women for enjoying the game the way they wanted to, in a particular moment, because it offended them. 
 
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 Times have changed and it shouldn't be a big deal for people to be capturing fun moments of life with their cell phones. Taking time out of the game to mock them and imply that they should be doing anything other than having a good time is just another example of the older generation of MLB being out of touch with the game as it exists in 2015. ||||| In politics, image is king, and every politician knows it. President Obama knows it more than most, having been caught in one or two pictures that hand his opponents, rightly or wrongly, a gift of a story. You may recall a small controversy over candidate Obama not putting his hand on his heart during the playing of the national anthem. The moment he bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia also became a conservative cause célèbre. 
 
 So it's surprising to see the president caught in a three-way selfie at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in South Africa, even if the other two people in the picture are the British and Danish Prime Ministers. The now iconic picture above, snapped by an AFP photographer, speaks more than its thousand-word allotment — largely because Michelle Obama appears to be the only one showing any decorum. 
 
 It doesn't take a David Axelrod to look at that and say, "Ouch. Not good." Especially not in the context of Selfies at Funerals, a Tumblr designed to shame the hundreds of (mostly) teenagers who liven up their sad days with egotistical snapshots. In the wake of the Obama funeral selfie, the Tumblr declared it could not top that, and promptly shut down at the height of its fame. 
 
 But this is the Internet age, where you don't just get a few lines of caption underneath a damning picture on your front page. You get the whole story whether you like it or not. So here's an object lesson in mitigating circumstances, suitable for sharing with anyone who decided to spin their own story on the basis of this picture. 
 
 First of all, this wasn't strictly a funeral; certainly not the solemn dressed-in-black occasion we often associate with the term. It was a four-hour stadium-sized memorial celebrating the life and works of the beloved Madiba, a riot of colorful dancing and singing. Think New Orleans meets the World Cup. 
 
 Secondly, it seems to have been a day for presidents and VIPs to take snaps of themselves. Witness Bush and Bono on Instagram (which wasn't technically a selfie, unless the former president has extraordinarily long arms): 
 
 Funeral selfie: George W. Bush posted this Instagram picture of him with Bono at the #MandelaMemorial pic.twitter.com/Sfu3LAPA6K — Kety Shapazian (@KetyDC) December 10, 2013 
 
 Thirdly, consider the context of the shot itself. In other photos, we can see the leaders joking around, switching seats, looking bored — all the things you might find it hard to avoid doing if you were stuck in a stadium for four hours. Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt appears to have been the first one to crack and pull out her smartphone. We can relate. 
 
 Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly in this case, it was Thorning-Schmidt taking the picture. If a major European leader asked you to get in on a quick snapshot, it would be churlish (and diplomatically inept) to refuse — especially if the sober British Prime Minister David Cameron was already in on the fun. 
 
 For the picture to be truly complete, you'd need to add speech balloons. Perhaps Thorning-Schmidt is saying, "Let's commemorate this amazing moment and the life of an incredible man with a joyous group photo." Maybe Michelle is thinking, "Man, I wish there were room for me in that picture." 
 
 The point is, we don't know the full context of what would be, for almost any other three people in the world, a private moment. Without that knowledge, a rush to judgment dishonors the memory of a man who spent decades fighting a society that systematically rushed to judgment. 
 
 Image may be king in politics, but it's high time that king was dethroned. 
 
 Nelson Mandela Memorial 
 
 Image: Roberto Schmidt AFP Getty
– One of the buzzier Tumblr entries of late is called "Selfies at Funerals," which compiles teen photos posted to Twitter or elsewhere that were taken at, yes, funerals. The ridicule has been fast and furious—oh, today's incredibly narcissistic and shallow teens—and totally out of line, argues PJ Vogt at OntheMedia. At least consider the possibility that this isn't about narcissism and is instead a classic case of an older generation not getting a younger one. "I suspect that for a lot of young people, a selfie is more like a public diary entry than it is a chance to show your friends how hot you look," writes Vogt. For those doing the mocking, "is this the kind of adult you wanted to be?" he asks. "A person who has no curiosity about why young people might do things in a new or different way from you." Besides, think of how grown-ups act at a funeral. Maybe, Vogt suggests, it's time for a Tumblr called "Adults In Suits Eating Hors d'oeuvres Near A Corpse." Click for the full column.