Fairness belongs in blogs as much as in print
Posted on Mon, Jun. 09, 2008
BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS
Wealthy sports stars such as Jason Taylor aren't like you and me, but that doesn't mean The Miami Herald can take license in writing about who they are and what they think.
The Dolphins defensive end has been the focus of a media barrage for weeks on whether after 11 years as a potential Hall-of-Famer, he will stay with the team. Coming off a successful stint on Dancing with the Stars, the handsome and well-spoken Taylor says he wants to play pro football for only one more year before going into the movies.
Journalists are at the apex of two colliding social revolutions: an obsession with celebrities and a freewheeling blogosphere pushing attitude over facts. The pressure is to turn celebrities into two-dimensional cartoon characters. And why not? The celebrities are rich at the public's expense, aren't they? We pay them to perform, and they in turn use the media to manipulate us and generate more popularity and money. It's all part of the game.
Enter Taylor. Through his agent, he told the Dolphins in January that he wanted to be traded so that he might have a chance in his last declared year of playing football to join a team with a better championship shot.
Since then, the story has been a dance between Taylor and the new Dolphins management under Bill Parcells over whether and how Taylor might be traded and whether, in the meantime, he will participate in preseason training.
It has been unfolding much like any union, political or diplomatic negotiation, with each side making incremental statements and then speaking off the record with reporters, often to add a spin.
Finally, last Sunday, Taylor himself met in Hollywood with the media in what he said was an attempt to clarify his position and deflate an unintended confrontation that has been growing with management.
Miami Herald reporter Jeff Darlington wrote an excellent story, summarizing and analyzing what Taylor said and did not say. Darlington drew a fine line between Taylor's saying he requested, instead of demanded, a trade, and quoted Taylor as saying: ``If [a trade] doesn't work out, then I'm a Miami Dolphin. I love this place. I love Miami. I love the fans. I love everything about it. If it doesn't work out, then I'm here.''
There has been nothing in Taylor's 11 years with the Dolphins to make me doubt the sincerity of that statement. Greg Cote in an accompanying Page One column Monday agreed. Cote added that he thought Taylor's finely-stated position would help maintain Taylor's support among fans. I wonder. I don't think saying you want a chance to win elsewhere is a particularly popular thing to say, and thus requires some bravery. But that is my opinion.
Dolphins columnist Armando Salguero, however, took a totally different view in his blog. ''Although Taylor lies'' -- and here Salguero puts a line through ''lies'' as if to edit it out but leaves the word for readers to see, and then picks up -- ``states he would be happy playing for the Dolphins in 2008, the fact remains he wants to play for a winner.''
Salguero repeats the edited ''lies'' technique later in the same paragraph, writing: ``it is about the chance to go out with a ring and he doesn't think he has that chance in Miami no matter what he lies says to protect his image.''
I agree with at least one blog participant who called the ''lies'' technique a cheap shot. Striking it out but leaving the word all but accuses Taylor of lying, and clearly insinuates that Salguero thinks he is.
''Lie'' is a fighting word in most places I have lived. If you are going to use it in the genteel confines of a newspaper, even in a backhanded way in an opinion blog, then you better present the proof to back it up. Salguero did not.
Executive Sports Editor Jorge Rojas, who did not see the blog until I brought it to his attention, partially agreed. 'I would be more comfortable with not using the word `lie,' '' he said, though he said he didn't find it a ''felony,'' particularly for the blogging world.
Still, he said, writing a blog or column ``is not a license to not practice basic ethical journalism.''
Salguero defends his cross-out technique, calling it ``a literary tool, sometimes to tweak people, sometimes to tweak myself, as a fun kind of thing.''
To my mind, that is not reason enough to support the technique. The blogosphere, in its infancy, is trying to defy traditional standards, but the issue is not stuffy tradition. It is fairness, no matter the media or the celebrity subject.
So, did Salguero think Taylor was in fact lying? ''I was trying to communicate that Jason Taylor, some of what he said, was indeed dancing with the truth, was indeed fudging,'' he said.
Salguero's position grows out of a column he had written for Sunday's paper, before Taylor's press conference. In the column, he predicted, citing no sources, that Taylor, ``if he is honest, and the mood is right, and reporters accept no equivocation, will say he wants to be traded from the Dolphins to a contending team.''
The column set off alarms among the Herald's Sunday editors for its bold statements on what Taylor really believes and predictions on what he was going to say. They called Sports Editor Rojas at home. Salguero said he had three sources, which were shared with Rojas. While Rojas told me that they weren't the strongest, he felt it was strong enough to let the columnist have his head, including forgoing any attribution, on a subject that was hardly life and death.
Salguero, for his part, said that as a columnist, ''I can write as the voice of God if I want to,'' meaning with an omniscient voice, like a novelist. ''I just better be right,'' he said.
Columnists are indeed paid to give their opinion, but there are limits to saying what someone else, even a celebrity, thinks or feels. Taylor, speaking for himself in the news conference, was much more nuanced than Salguero predicted he would be. Salguero wasn't wrong; he just wasn't totally right, unless you think Taylor was ''lying.'' Or maybe, like the rest of us, Taylor, too, is complicated, with mixed and changing feelings.
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