LeBatard on TMZ Sports and Gotcha Journalism

[21]

Was this posted here? Apologies if it was....seems like SJ wheelhouse material.

I remember the first time I felt the shift. It was while viewing a photograph of Alex Rodriguez that made me feel dirty in June 2007. He was getting on a hotel elevator late at night with a curvy blonde woman who wasn't his wife. It was gotcha! gossip disguised as . . . what? Investigative journalism? Regardless, it was in a major American newspaper. And it felt to me like the game changed forever that day.

One of the first orders of business at TMZ Sports, rest assured, will be to out a gay male athlete. It is the only boundary left to cross. It will either wreck that athlete's life or make him the next Jackie Robinson or maybe both.

That's a pretty horrible thing to do to someone against their will, obviously.

But an outraged America will punish the behavior by showering it with views, dollars and rewards.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/05/1516552/anything-goes-in-gossip-world.html

 

[imjustagirl]

He's wrong on one count, for sure...

A few days later, hundreds of Red Sox fans behind home plate taunted Rodriguez as he walked to the batter's box by wearing blond-haired masks. It felt, all at once, creepy and voyeuristic and funny and unfair.

That was 100 percent funny.

 

[LongTimeListener]

TMZ might not be breaking new ground here. Deadspin tried to do this with Ovie Mughelli a few months ago. I know because it was the very moment I swore off Deadspin forever.

 

[Small Town Guy]

TMZ, to my knowledge, has never outed an actor or singer (Perez Hilton, a different story). I don't think they're necessarily going to start outing athletes (creator Harvey Levin is gay, for what it's worth). And 2007 was really the first time he felt something had shifted? That A-Rod picture? Hmm. TMZ will cover sports trials - thrilling - and the late-night antics of guys hitting .275, in the same way their bread and butter is often B-list celebrities, not necessarily the big guys. It's a horrible site. And an even more annoying TV show: "So, Nicole Eggert was walking past a Dairy Queen last week," says the long-haired doofus hipster. "And our guy was like, 'Yo, Nicole, did you get a sundae or a shake?' HAHAHAHAHAHA."

But I don't see it altering the landscape anymore than any of the other major sites - deadspin, brooks, big lead - have.

 

[Alma]

LeBatard remains a talented writer...and I still can't bring myself to ever agree with him in a committed fashion, because he is a noted apologist of athletes, and when a Ricky Williams quits football and his playoff-promising team because he's addicted to marijuana, LeBatard scolds the reader for thinking it's anything less than a spiritual choice.

In other words, LeBatard would gladly write about the personal lives of athletes so long as they protect and justify the athlete, and the story comes scrubbed with the athlete's full approval. He's done so skillfully many times.

 

[Joe Williams]

LeBatard remains a talented writer...and I still can't bring myself to ever agree with him in a committed fashion, because he is a noted apologist of athletes, and when a Ricky Williams quits football and his playoff-promising team because he's addicted to marijuana, LeBatard scolds the reader for thinking it's anything less than a spiritual choice.

In other words, LeBatard would gladly write about the personal lives of athletes so long as they protect and justify the athlete, and the story comes scrubbed with the athlete's full approval. He's done so skillfully many times.

Well played.

 

[BTExpress]

Next thing you know, just a few years after the A-Rod photo, our appetite for celebrity and sports and scandal had grown so insatiable and profitable that a broken professional golfer had to give a 13-minute sex confessional in front of his poor mother, a room full of support-group friends and more than 20 million Americans on TV.

Charlie Sheen doesn't have to do this after allegedly holding a knife to his wife's neck. Skid Row drummer Phil Varone doesn't have to do this after having not one, not two but three ménage à trois (Is that the plural? Ménage troises?) with three mother-daughter combos on one tour. But a rock-star entertainer who hits a golf ball for a living somehow had to grovel before America after a frenzied media realized just how much money there was to be made in and around his famous shame.

He "had to"? Really? Not to play golf, he didn't. Maybe to salvage his endorsements. But that was his choice all along.

And it's "ménages à trois", Dan. Just find the right term instead of pretending that's it's funny that you don't know it.

 

[spaceman]

LeBatard remains a talented writer...and I still can't bring myself to ever agree with him in a committed fashion, because he is a noted apologist of athletes, and when a Ricky Williams quits football and his playoff-promising team because he's addicted to marijuana, LeBatard scolds the reader for thinking it's anything less than a spiritual choice.

In other words, LeBatard would gladly write about the personal lives of athletes so long as they protect and justify the athlete, and the story comes scrubbed with the athlete's full approval. He's done so skillfully many times.

Well played.

indeed, sir.

 

[Piotr Rasputin]

I don't understand how the "Stray-Rod" story changed the landscape, more than two decades after Wade Boggs was sued by Margo Adams. That was the one I remember from my childhood, though others may have different examples.

Athletes stepping out has been media fodder for a long time. No need to beat our breasts and scream that TMZ, or radaronline, or any of the so-called sports media gossip Web sites invented this scene.

 

[heyabbott]

He's wrong on one count, for sure...

A few days later, hundreds of Red Sox fans behind home plate taunted Rodriguez as he walked to the batter's box by wearing blond-haired masks. It felt, all at once, creepy and voyeuristic and funny and unfair.

That was 100 percent funny.

I was at a Baltimore Orioles home game against The Red Sox right after Boggs mistress Margo Adams was publicized. Memorial stadium was close to sold out and every time Boggs came to the plate 40,000+ yelled MAAAARRRR-GOOOOOO. This stuff has been going on for 25 years, TMZ isn't doing anything new. It's just doing it in quantity.

 

[21]

I don't understand how the "Stray-Rod" story changed the landscape, more than two decades after Wade Boggs was sued by Margo Adams. That was the one I remember from my childhood, though others may have different examples.

Athletes stepping out has been media fodder for a long time. No need to beat our breasts and scream that TMZ, or radaronline, or any of the so-called sports media gossip Web sites invented this scene.

PR, I get your point, but the analogy doesn't really work here. Margo Adams filed a $12 million lawsuit against Boggs, which gave the media something legit to cover. Not really the same as publishing pics of ballplayers with random women.

 

[clutchcargo]

TMZ might not be breaking new ground here. Deadspin tried to do this with Ovie Mughelli a few months ago. I know because it was the very moment I swore off Deadspin forever.

You can't be serious----WHO???!!!