(Painting your nickname on your gloves? Okay, that is pretty cool)

Matt Lindland is known as a man with some strong opinions. He’s also known as a man who loves to voice them even when silence might be the better option. This is just one more reason why he’s a good guy to have in the MMA scene.

But Lindland doesn’t necessarily feel the same way about us, the MMA media. In an interview with Sam Caplan on Five Ounces of Pain, he had these sharp words for those of us who write stuff about MMA on the internets:

The MMA media almost always agrees with whatever Dana [White] says. There’s a lot of media out there that just cow tow to him so that they can get their credentials, or whatever. The MMA media is not journalistically prudent. They don’t do much research; they’re lazy. They don’t do their own stories. They go out and take stories from other people and make up their own. I don’t have a lot of respect for too many people in the media and the MMA media industry. They pretty much promote Dana White.

I’m not going to point out that most of the MMA media exists in the form of websites and most of those websites do not get press credentials to UFC events. I’m also not going to point out that Dana White is often the favorite target for MMA websites and as a result often takes a lot of really personal, really undue (and some totally due) criticism. No, I won’t point out any of that, because that’s not the kind of guy I am.

But I will point out that Lindland’s comment about the MMA media being lazy and not coming up with their own stories appeared on MMA website Five Ounces of Pain, right above a story linking to some news that Sherdog broke earlier in the day.

My point is that yes, we do often write stories about the stories other people have written. I’m doing it right now. We all do it. So does every newspaper in America. Would the better idea be to ignore interesting news just because we weren’t the first ones to report it?

But wait, the conspiracy that Lindland has identified reaches deeper than just the lazy MMA media:

And even outside of MMA, honestly, I’ve had major publications want to do stories on me (and) when Dana White finds out they want to write about a legitimate athlete who is a world and Olympic-caliber medalist that is now fighting MMA, he’ll get in there and make sure that if they want to get credentials to anymore shows or they want access to any UFC fighters that they don’t do an article about me. (Laughs) Me, I’m not really impressed with the MMA media or the media in general.

There you have it. Matt Lindland? Not impressed with the media. Any of it. The lack of Matt Lindland-related articles proves that there are serious deficiencies in their methods.

It’s funny, though. Lindland seems to have no problem using these same media outlets to drum up support — especially the financial kind — for his current political campaign, which is exactly what he does in the first third of his interview with Caplan. Maybe someone should tell him that if he’s going to run for public office he should learn to play nice with the media, especially the media willing to give him some coverage.

I’m not going to point out which type of media that might be. That’s not the kind of guy I am.