Miami ? We demand only one thing from the people we cover — be perfect. Each time, every time, all the time.

So when Kansas University basketball coach Roy Williams — on the spot, before millions of TV viewers, crushed from having just lost the most important game of his life, having already answered the question once — is pushed into answering it again and he snaps off an expletive, well, why isn’t this monster behind bars?

The media sometimes get a bad name because they so often deserve a bad name.

We operate without brains almost as frequently as we operate without hearts.

Sure, Williams had to be asked Monday night about the North Carolina job, a job he clearly has interest in even while guiding Kansas to the title game. But asking him before he had an opportunity to compose himself was not particularly kind.

Asking him twice was flat cruel, cold and insensitive.

Oh, but that’s hard-hitting journalism for you, the people’s right to know and all those other well-founded principles we use to mask the fact we care a whole lot more about the news than the people who make it.

This business is about quotes and sound bites, and if that means sticking a microphone in the face of the dead kid’s mother as they take away the body bag, understand that’s just us doing our jobs. More importantly, that’s just us doing our jobs well.

Williams was 100 percent wrong in cursing on the air. It was unprofessional, like Greg Cote showing up in the Dolphins’ press box wearing his underwear outside his pants.

But also unprofessional was that second question.

You need to understand something else about the media. Williams had no chance to win in this scenario.

He would have been criticized last week for honestly answering the North Carolina questions even more than he was criticized for not answering them. We simply would be flip-flopped to prove our concrete point.

By deflecting the questions, he was ripped for allowing the issue to linger.

If he had truly said what he feels, which again seems obvious, he would have been ripped for abandoning his Kansas players.

Bonnie Bernstein’s second question was this: “But if they offered the job right now, would you be willing to take it?”

Here’s my question: How is Williams supposed to answer that? If he says anything but no — which, apparently, would be a lie — he’s criticized by the genius blowhards because his players didn’t hear it directly from him first.

See how this works? Beautiful, huh? Better still, since he answered with his temper, we now can bury Williams because of that, too.

Thankfully, no one in the media ever loses his cool.

Yep, we’re always right, making us perfect, which is more than you can say about the scum we cover.

Or is it scum that covers us?