awriter said:
The blonde story is the perfect example of that! Do you have some personal issue with Canzano or The Oregonian? Do you work for the Blazers or represent any of the players?
The level of paranoia on this thread is breathtaking. I don't know Canzano, don't read the Oregonian, don't watch basketball, don't have a vested interest here in anything other than the practice and craft of journalism.
I first posted on this thread because it struck me fishy that 24 hours after Canzano got spanked by his own paper, a new thread begins, referring to him as a "reporter's reporter." Okay, sometimes folks come here to blow their own horn, or rehabilitate their own image, or simply defend themselves behind a screen name. Perfectly fair given the nature of SportsJournalists.com.
Every post I've made here refers simply to the interview he gave. I clicked the link, read the Q & A, and posted my thoughts about it. That Canzano knows how to use a Reverse Phone Directory, or file an FOIA request, or has sources in his own community is admirable, but not, to me, necessarily worthy of note. As others have said in this thread, all those things are, or should be, pretty standard weapons in a reporter's arsenal.
And I agree completely with Alma when I question the use of those weapons in service of the story about the blonde.
Again, that an individual makes a consensual decision to accompany a player to a hotel and have sex with him, does not, to me, rise to the level of news. Nor is it a strong illustration of Canzano's larger argument about the "twisted culture" of the NBA. Here's the quote from his column:
The next day, just before tip-off, a taxi pulled up to the steps of the Rose Garden. A twentysomething blonde slipped out of the taxi and headed toward Will Call, where she collected a complimentary ticket and came through the turnstiles.
She told me she had been flown from Seattle to Portland by one of the Lakers players and had spent the night in his hotel room. She then explained, "The hotel doors of the other players were swinging open and closed all night there were so many different women coming in and out."
It's a scene that goes down all the time in the twisted culture of the NBA.
The NBA, may, in fact, be an alarmingly twisted culture. But one woman making an individual decision to have consensual sex with a ballplayer is hardly the evidence Canzano needs to prove a larger pattern, a cultural pattern, of disrespect to women. That it sounds like several women made the same consensual decision that night in that hotel in fact undermines Canzano's own argument.
And as to whether or not this kind of promiscuity might "invite trouble", as you suggest, I would say of course it does - in some cases. But is it our job to write about what "might" happen? Or should we be writing about what
has happened? Again, consensual sex is not news.
I'm not disagreeing with his premise. Professional and collegiate athletes in sports of all kinds in all markets show us time and again that there's an embedded disrespect for women in the male-dominated sports world. And there are lots of ways to write that story.
I'm just saying that
this story about
this specific blonde doesn't bolster Canzano's argument. In fact, it reads more like easy salaciousness - or, as was said earlier in the thread - another example of "sex sells."
