On LeBatard, LeBron and the Media

Dan LeBatard has always struck me as a smart guy, and an excellent writer. I even enjoy his loopy persona on Pardon the Interruption. I appreciate his general tendency toward contrarianism in the face of the journalistic orthodoxy. That said, this column is a bit of a scattered mess. First off, what's been real about Barry Bonds since, say, 1991? Second, the reason Chad Ochocinco forms "his own media" is because he is an inveterate self-promoter, and the Internet presents him with the opportunity to form that media.*

Third, Chad Pennington did not lecture the New York tabloids about "fairness"; he lectured them about what a privilege it was to cover the New York Jets, and that they should treat such a privilege with respect, mostly because they were criticizing Pennington for playing poorly at a crucial time of the season. This is New York; this is what the tabloids do. Fourth, Isiah Thomas complaining that articulate athletes like Bill Russell and Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali could never survive in today's media world seems to ignore the fact that much of the sports media in the late 1960s was not only far more conservative, but at least in some cases, overtly racist. Every one of those athletes did have to deal with widespread condescension, even if the media wasn't quite as saturated with the sheer number of opinions as it is today; to say otherwise seems disingenuous, at least to me.

Now I understand--and I agree with--LeBatard's larger point: That the general tenor of media is coarser and meaner than it's ever been**. Most of that has to do with the acceleration of the news cycle, with the proliferation of news outlets and "news outlets"--with, in fact, the same lack of a professional filter that allows athletes like Ochocinco to essentially report on themselves without independent verification. It works both ways: If an athlete wants to shape his own brand, if an athlete refuses to permit any independent access to his world, if he expects us to form an opinion of him through a series of television commercials and publicist-written "blog posts," then he has to expect that the media's judgment of him will be harsher when he strays from that company line. This is exactly what happened with Tiger, of course--the last time we'd heard anything remotely real from him, he was telling dirty jokes to Charles P. Pierce a decade ago--and this is now what's happening with LeBron James.

The other day, LeBron tweeted that he was now keeping "mental notes" about those who had spoken poorly of him. This, of course, has long been the modern strategy for parrying media criticism, whether deserved or undeserved: You invent an enemy, you blame the haters, and then, when you succeed, you lash out at your imaginary blacklist. It's a way of motivating yourself, but it's also a way of denying the fact that there may be a legitimate basis for people finding some of your decisions specious. That's where LeBron's lost his way, and that's really the problem with LeBatard's column, too: He buried some legitimate criticisms under a blanket of condemnation. 

*Though LeBatard is half-right here; the media, and the sports media especially, inexplicably tends to lump harmless goofballs like Ochocinco in with convicted criminals. Twenty-five years from now, I guarantee we'll be looking back with nostalgic wonder at T.O. and Ochocinco and all those self-centered but otherwise harmless products of the Twitter generation. As someone who spent the past several years engaging in Jim McMahon-based nostalgia, I know of what I speak.

**LeBatard also claims sports journalism is now "dumber," but I'm not sure I can completely agree with that. It's just that the best sports media is far smarter than it's ever been, and the worst of what passes for sports media is far, far dumber. Speaking of which, Bill Simmons asked several intelligent questions of Mark Cuban a few years ago, which Cuban then turned into a referendum on how much SportsCenter anchors are paid. So it works both ways.

(Photo: Boston.com)

On Michael

It has been said, and it will be said...

And yet I suppose the moment I realized that yesterday was much bigger than I could have imagined was when I began to remember things that I didn't even know were still contained within my hippocampus: The time Scott Holderman and I attempted to transcribe all the lyrics to Thriller,* the old Bloom County strips where (I believe) Opus accompanies the Jacksons on the Victory Tour, the innocent horror we felt when we heard about Michael's hair-related pyrotechnics (because even then, Michael seemed somehow invulnerable), the fact that every replay of the "Thriller" video became a paralyzing event upon which all the frenzy of childhood came to a standstill. It was around this time that Michael became the embodiment of '80s celebrity, and it was around this time that he probably lost himself for good. And I think it is probably around this time that we lost ourselves a little bit, as well.

This, for me, is what will last about Michael, beside the music: It is the fact that he came to represent the acceleration of media over the past three decades; it is that, even as he declined to evolve, society evolved through him, in the same way it had evolved through Elvis a generation earlier. We became a tabloid culture, with Michael as our emperor; we developed an overweening obsession with the foibles of the rich and pampered, and Michael became a cipher, and while he brought much of this upon himself, it is also true that he is a reflection of us, and of just how far we've come in the 25 years since the Victory Tour. At some point--and I would argue it might have come around 1986, the period I've spent the the past couple of years exploring for my next book--the emotional walls built up around celebrities were torn down for good, and we were deluged with a sea of new (and often false, and crude) mythologies, those of O.J. and Jacko and Tonya and Nancy. And for better or worse, the cultural landscape we inhabit became a very different place.

This is why those of us who grew up in the 1980s view him in a completely different way than those who came after: Because we might not always see it, but there is a dividing line between us. Because we view culture differently. Because we were the bridge between the age of innocence and the age of cynicism, and Michael Jackson, more than any figure, carried us over that gap.

I cannot remember the specifics of most of those Bloom County strips--the books remain stranded in my room at my parents' house in Pennsylvania**--but I remember, even as their creator, Berke Breathed, poked holes in the notion of modern celebrity through the foibles of the Jacksons, he managed to display an unmistakable sympathy for Michael, for this person who seemed entirely unprepared for the frenzy he'd unleashed, a supremely talented manchild who was about to embark on a journey into an age where he never really seemed to belong.

*This was much more difficult than we realized, given that we had to continually lift the record needle and place it back down precisely where we'd left it. It may have occupied an entire week of our summer, and even then, our translation was woeful. We were especially confounded by "This is the end of your life," from "Thriller, which we translated as, "There's something in or behind," apparently revealing my early fondness for prepositions.
**And I'm not sure how they hold up, but in the moment, they formed the sharpest satirical portrait of the era. I have no doubt there are several thousand writers, like me, who would cite Bloom County as one of the top five cultural influences of our childhood.