Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

Reporting accurate information for bad reasons undermines the trust of the public more than reporting false information?

Absolutely ridiculous.

 

Thanks to the person who PMd me about the young copy editor who picked up on Albom's fuck-up.

 

Thank god no one gave Jayson Blair any free tickets. This business would really be in trouble.

 

C'mon, we all know Magic doesn't have AIDS anymore. Lots of people contract HIV and then gain 100 pounds in the next 20 years while showing no symptoms and opening a bunch of movie theaters.

 

Magic never had AIDS.

[/semantics]

 

Count me on the "plagiarism/fictionalization" is much, much worse than "free ticket to ballgame" side, although those who have great memories will note that there's at least some inconsistency reconciling this belief with my strong OTHER belief that narrative journalism (written reconstruction of events and conversations after extensive reporting by people who weren't actually there) is a valid storytelling method in our business.

 

Don't worry, pro franchises and some college teams are talking about charging reporters (well, their employers) full top-level luxury-box ticket prices for admission to the press box.

In addition to full freight for parking, food, and of course internet access.

Real quick the bill will run up to the point where it costs a couple hundred bills to send a writer to each game -- and that's where pretty much all papers below major metros will say the hell with it and use AP.

Which opens up more seats in the press box the schools can sell to big-money donors. At full freight, of course.

 

Just the HIV. I know people will say I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I firmly believe he's one some test drug that others don't have access to.

 

Why does it have to be either/or with ethics in journalism. Can't Albom's failings be terrible on their own, without comparing it to being on the take, which is also horrible.

 

I haven't been able to find that column, but I believe I also said Johnson should tell the full story of how he acquired HIV. I wrote that because on the day of his announcement, he said he would be "a spokesman for HIV." Such was our ignorance in 1991 that even 15 minutes before the press conference, Johnson did not know the difference between HIV and AIDS. A year after the announcement, I thought it was reasonable to then ask "a spokesman for HIV" to tell his story so we might avoid the behavior that led to his infection.

As it happened, two weeks after I wrote those three or four paragraphs at the end of a column about Johnson's planned comeback to the NBA, he did tell his story. By then Isiah Thomas had denied he was the source of long-running basketball-circle rumors that Johnson was bisexual. Johnson, in telling his story on ABC's "Prime Time Live" magazine show, admitted to a heterosexual promiscuity that left interviewer Chris Wallce (to cite Bob Ryan's description) "stupified." Johnson said he'd had unprotected sex with numerous women, once with six in a single session.

If I could take back anything I've ever written, it would be those three or four paragraphs of opinion. Not that they were a lie. Not that they were fiction. Not that they were incorrect in their use of the day's data. Not that I didn't believe what I wrote. But they had no place in a basketball column. More important, they were insensitive to Johnson's circumstances. They also offended colleagues I respected, among them some who had friends dead of AIDS.

 

Bravo, sir. A masterful non-mea culpa, mea culpa.

Here's an article referring to the PrimeTime Live special that left Chris Wallace "stupefied."

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1992-11-03/news/9202270340_1_aids-virus-hiv-virus-magic-johnson

However . . .

Despite the loud ignorance of Karl Malone (and others), we knew a lot more about Magic and HIV when he attempted his 1992 comeback than we knew a year earlier. Soon after his November, 1991 announcement that he had HIV, Magic appeared on the Arsenio Hall show and made clear that he had contracted HIV through heterosexual sex.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dLkDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=%22magic+johnson%22+hiv+%22arsenio+hall%22&source=bl&ots=C4V_DOuBXz&sig=ctNqzWO9UlQ43ICI21R7qkF7YNQ&hl=en&ei=DYlHTPDnM8WqlAek3IGKBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBcQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=%22magic%20johnson%22%20hiv%20%22arsenio%20hall%22&f=false

(scroll down a couple of pages, to the Arsenio interview information)

http://www.marclamonthill.com/magic-johnson-and-hiv-15-years-later-1330

He did the PrimeTime appearance - with more details regarding the actual sexual encounter - in the wake of his aborted comeback in 1992 (not sure we needed to know that he had sex with six women at one time to think "Gee, Magic probably caught it from some random encounter." It's not like we didn't know that - horrors! - NBA teams have groupies). But shortly after the initial announcement, he practically sprinted to Arsenio to make sure everyone knew how he got HIV.

Other trips down memory lane:

http://157.166.255.4/vault/article/magazine/MAG1140267/1/index.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-08/local/me-812_1_magic-johnson

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-24/sports/sp-636_1_magic-johnson

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_n7_v220/ai_17932933/

http://articles.dailypress.com/1992-11-06/sports/9211060267_1_hiv-magic-johnson-unprotected-heterosexual

The money quote from that last one:

"Dave Kindred, a columnist for The Sporting News, publicly called for Johnson to come clean about how he contracted the virus, even though Johnson has repeatedly said it was through unprotected heterosexual activity."

 

Yeah, I've consistently been one who respectfully disagreed with you on that issue on narratives. I hold that any re-creations of events the writer didn't observe is bogus no matter who wrote it, no matter how many people were interviewed. Some element of fiction is unavoidable in that technique. The perception of some amount of fiction is even greater.

Unfortunately, it is not professionally practical for me to shun these people. Nor would it be fair to badmouth them to hiring editors as being unethical for using a technique condoned by their newsrooms, if not by me. But I do believe fabricating something you fully expect will happen is not as bad as fabricating something you know didn't happen and never will happen. Or maybe happened, but no one's saying. Or maybe happened, but no one remembers it quite the same way and you're going with the version that reads best. Fiction, all.

Albom clearly had no self-interest in writing that column and Freep editors were obviously aware of what he was doing--a misguided attempt to make the paper not look two days old. It would have been a bad decision even if everything had wound up being exactly as Albom wrote. But the motive for doing this mitigates the crime. I don't expect many here to agree with me, but Freep management obviously did.