Radio, newspaper, and my ethics

I like a mass that ends before kickoff. Thanks.

 

With all due respect, PC, the ethical line isn't gone. I assume no one here would be OK with Canzano moonlighting as the Blazers' PR director, for instance, so as far as conflict of interest, there still is a line that all of us would agree shouldn't be crossed. We're just trying to establish where it is. I think an individual journalist going into business with the owner of the team he covers is a reasonable place to draw that line.

What amazes me is that as journalists, we'd never condone this kind of impropriety from other people whose impartiality is important to their work. Say an NFL referee worked in the offseason for one of Jerry Jones' companies. Wouldn't there be an avalanche of columns calling for his firing? Even if he were the most trusted ref in the league and he said there were a million safeguards in place and Jones didn't actually sign his paycheck, we'd all write about how this was an unacceptable conflict of interest, that he couldn't be trusted to remain unbiased. The same is true of Canzano. We should hold ourselves to higher standards than that.

 

My own version of hell involves attending a daily mass with RokSki as the priest and the game coming on in exactly 45 minutes.

 

Ah, my favorite part of Mass when I was a kid, because it meant at that exact instant it was the longest possible time between Mass that week and Mass the next week.

 

Actually, you're right. A sports section could certainly be run in a way that would give it more gravitas, but if so, I'll bet the readership would plummet, because that's not the "fun" stuff. Anybody think a publication could exist primarily on the type of the SI stories I cited in my last post? I say no way. That's more "news with a sports theme" than sports in a pure sense. Even SI has to run fantasy sections and all the other fluff to stay afloat these days.

I'd also agree with Zeke that the other sections of most papers have a lot of fluff, but there's no higher "fluff percentage" than the sports section.

 

Never read the USA TODAY Life section?

 

Another sportswriter commonality... skin thinner than a Trojan.

Toy department.

 

Wrong. Most sports sections don't have enough stories that are inside the lines.
Too many sports sections are woefully ignorant about the games they cover.

 

Amen to that. Although ours was "The mass has ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord," because they couldn't just finish it without throwing in a few more instructions.

 

Actually, Canzano lost all his ethics and journalistic integrity long ago when writing for the Oregonian. Who can ever forget the "Blazers to name Marc Iavaroni as head coach" headline? Great reporting there Canzano. And reporting on Darius Miles having a credit card rejected when paying for gas? Oh boy, that's quite a scoop there. And even recently, Canzano posted a report on his web blog from some quack doctor saying Greg Oden has mononucleosis. This from a doctor who hadn't actually examined Oden. Yeah, that's excellent reporting!

Judge you on your work? Sure.

 

1-post putz.

 

Please post a complete bibliography of every item Canzano has ever reported along with a checklist of what was right and what was wrong.

Thanks, loser!