Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

Bashing Albom for putting too much helium in the balloon, inventing drama, embellishing facts, is like bashing the sun for being too hot. It just is.
Where the anger should be directed here is at the tinpot organization that chose to honor him. But expecting an ethical decision from the APSE is like looking for ice cream in a hardware store.
Please wake me when the old boys come out and say that writers should not be allowed to participate in any award voting, for instance, or when the sports editors of America vow their employees will not accept the team rate for hotels on road trips. And so on. These guys are all about their own celebrity (albeit in a small world), about their Triple Crowns, about their infatuation with the celebrities around them. Albom is a superstar to them, and no facts, or clever alteration of those facts, will change that.

 

He has peers? From the way people talk, you'd think no one else is on his level or anywhere close to it.

I don't know if I've ever read a word he has written. If I have, it certainly must not have been all that memorable.

 

I believe some local reporters from a St. Louis newspaper had requested interviews with Richardson and Cleaves. Obviously, when the two former Spartan players didn't show up they didn't get their interview. Days later, they read Albom's story and either complained because they didn't get their interview --- or spilled the beans that the players never showed.

 

It will be interesting to see what happens in December, when his contract is up.
Do they keep him at full price, get a reduced rate or cut their losses in a tough economy... or does he walk away and say he doesn't want to renew, hoping the interwebs throw him big bucks?

 

Once upon a time a reporter/columnist publicly questioned Magic Johnson's often-repeated claim that he got HIV through heterosexual activity. Basically said everything but "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!!"

"He said unprotected heterosexual sex did it," the writer wrote. "Numbers say that's unlikely. One study says the odds are one in 500 even if a man uses no condom and his partner already has the virus. . . . A man is hundreds of times more likely to acquire HIV by homosexual contact or by using dirty hypodermic needles.

"It is forgivable for a man to hide such activity--if no one else is hurt by his behavior. But it is reprehensible if a man serving his self-interest helps create a frightening lie that causes research money to be diverted from more critical fields."

Of course, the writer did not cite the source of his figures, which were hopelessly wrong, seeing as The Centers for Disease Control say that 6% of those infected with HIV got it through heterosexual activity.

I say we give this writer a lifetime achievement award. Come on down, Dave Kindred.

We now return you to the annual drawing and quartering of Mitch Albom.

 

6 percent of men infected got it through heterosexual activity? Or 6 percent of all those infected with HIV, including men and women?

 

Only 6 percent of men get it from women? Sweet... I'm going to stop using a condom 94 percent of the time!

 

The accounts I heard was that Albom's column went out on the Freep's corporate syndication wire (they were Knight-Ridder at the time) at the time it was actually filed (i.e. well before tipoff of the Saturday semifinal games) and some wire editor somewhere along the line saw the column with the lengthy passages, "Cleaves and Richardson sat happily in the stands decked out in their MSU gear watching the Spartans," and said, "hey wait a minute, that game hasn't happened yet."

One editor called another and things started to break.

It was all the result of the Freep's JOA restrictions at the time -- the News produced the Sunday sports sections.

 

I believe it was a fairly young woman, who was relatively new on the job, and she was in Duluth or something like that.

 

To be fair, we all had a lot to learn regarding HIV at the time Magic, in his own words, "attained" the virus.

Journalists, if they are in a position to express opinions, likely end up in many situations where they say something they would like to take back. Magic's announcement made a lot of people run off half-cocked with uninformed speculation in many directions. It's just that Kindred apparently immortalized his thoughts on paper.

 

nothing undermines public trust more than reporters and editors on the take - and that includes free tickets.

 

Nope.
This still isn't even close.
Making up stuff, publishing fiction, is the ultimate in our business.
At the end of the day, we are entirely dependent on the gift of information to do our jobs. Fortunes have been made because a source is willing to give that "gift" to one reporter and not another. To suggest that one would be more beholden to a source because of the exchange of a sports ticket than over the exchange of precious information is ludicrous.