While our access to voyeurism is unparalled in history, our relationships to our landbase and local community are dying as fast as trees and salmon. The further we move from our animal selves to our techno selves the more unhealthy and dangerous to the Earth we are.

Basketball is an escape for me. The game is beautiful. I LOVE pouring over stats and trade rumors and theorizing about team chemistry and such, but I am glad that PDX beat writers are no longer sitting in strip club parking lots waiting for Zach’s posse to do something weird… because I would read about it, even though I claim I don’t wanna know. A byproduct of media addiction, inherent in our culture I suppose.

the pilot could land my plane safely if I were on it. I’ve seen the same thing before a few years back on CNN and the plane landed just fine and I felt pretty relieved afterwards. Seems like every year before I got on summer vacation there is a Discovery Channel documentary about plane crashes.

I do agree with you about not getting into peoples personal lives. I’ve seen Greg a few times around Portland and it catch’s me off guard. I just don’t even want to talk to him because I figure he gets so sick of people asking him for autographs and asking him how practice is going. I think of how I would want to be left alone if on my time away from my job. Should people just ignore a celebrity? I kind of wonder if they ever feel isolated from the real people of the world. It must seem strange to be in a world where people value only for the work you do on a basketball court more than the person you are off it.

Even if it’s not relayed to you by a medium. Drive by any major car crash, and you will see many many people slowing down and gazing to see what happened, even when they are on the other side of the road, often leading to traffic jams or even more crashes. Don’t know if that’s our deeply-engrained instincts to assess if there is still a threat, or a “glad it wasn’t me” feeling, or something else. But people will look, and since the media knows this, instead of showing more “happy news” they will report on all kinds of tragic events: Crashes, bombings, shootings, war, floods,… If it’s live as it happens, even better.

I guess with celebrities in sports, entertainment, politics it’s a similar mechanism. They are often portrayed – and in some cases really start to behave – as if they were superhuman beings. They are modern royalties or religious icons. They are representatives of our dreams, hopes, fears; doing things we couldn’t do. So people also want to see when they fall down from their pedestal and become mere mortals again. We want to see the drug problems, the sex affairs, the crappy reviews and what not just like we wanted to see the glorious moments.

They should stop televising Knicks games.

I just couldn’t bring myself to go to Duck’s memorial. I sorta wanted to go….but I questioned my motives about why. I suspected it was to see the guys as much as it was to pay my respects to Kevin and his family. Once I realized this…..I decided that going to something like this …for the entertainment value….was just wrong. Let me be clear….I am not criticizing anyone who chose to go…I just wasn’t comfortable going myself

For the most part, I think players/team should be able to define the parameters of their own privacy. If, say, Trout wants to have Jason Quick down to Mississippi to go fishing, then I’m sure we all appreciate getting to know him a little better. (It may also make us hope he gets traded, but that’s the way it goes.)

But for the most part, it should be the player’s decision. If a players is going through a personal family situation, and doesn’t want to address it in a public forum, then the media and the public should respect that privacy.

The line blurs when we start talking about player “misconduct,” which is difficult to define in and of itself. Sometimes it’s easy – if a player commits a DUI, I say that’s fair game to grill him about. You make $1 million per year, you chose not to get a taxi and potentially risk others’ safety – deal with a few questions about it.

Other times, like with Jordan/Barkley’s gambling issues, I think the line’s difficult to nail down. They’re not REALLY hurting anyone other than themselves by gambling away hundreds of thousands, so why is it a public issue? It may be interesting to us that they have problems, but does the fact that we buy tickets to watch them play basketball (and fund their tremendous salaries) entitle us to hear all about those problems?

I say no. On a smaller scale, does the fact that a customer helps fund your sales/marketing/law/whatever salary give him or her the right to know everything about you? Philosophically, I don’t think it’s much different. It’s one thing for politicians, who are asking us to trust them to run the city/state/country with millions of dollars of our money. But basketball is just business on a larger scale. There’s a lot of money involved, and we may think that entitles us to know everything about the players we support, but I don’t see why it should. They’re entitled to their own lives.

Interesting topic, Dave. Good read. I don’t think you’re going to find stuff like this on other NBA blogs, and I like that about the Edge.

In addition to your thoughts about the roll of the media Dave, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Do you ever get the impression that they are disappointed when the plane does not crash, or the storm gets downgraded from a 5 to a 1?

A night at a strip club—even though that’s not how I’d spend my time—shouldn’t necessarily be reported. In isolation that’s not a weighty matter compared to the others, but when you consider the need for all of us to be human beings with peculiarities and leisure time it actually means a lot. The meat of the matter isn’t strip clubs versus not, it’s basic humanity, privacy, and the need to feel like you can do some things without carrying the weight of a city on your shoulders in every moment.

Whoa, whoa, whoa… Canzano better strap up, those sound like fighting words. :)

What point should the coverage stop? Good question. I only know living in Portland Oregon that in relationship to The Blazers, the coverage is going to be microscopic and all encompassing. The Blazers Edge is a symptom. Look what a dedicated fanbase The Blazers have. That’s great when The Rose Garden fills, The team is winning and we have a GM that has evaluated character and culture in the assembly of the team. As we have seen it’s not so great when the team is in a rebuilding cycle, has some troubled players and perhaps a GM that gambled on talent without evaluating character and team culture. The Media is going to be there, it’s unstoppable. It’s going to show us and tell us more than we need to know. We can be idealistic as individuals, create our own personal standards and try to apply them but let’s be honest with ourselves if we see a headline “Blazer arrested” or “Blazer in Strip Club” are we really not going to read it?

The media coverage is an unstoppable entity. So the question where should the coverage stop becomes moot. If someone named Zach Randolph stops at a local adult establishment while on bereavement leave before catching a flight out of Portland, maybe we shouldn’t care, maybe it’s a non-story but it’s going to be reported and we are going to read about it. Something as innocent as Travis Outlaw stating he’d like a bigger role on the team and some more shots get’s reported and evaluated and re-evaluated. Sometime the coverage is ridiculous but we embrace it. It’s like the huge back-up on the freeway with cars inching along for miles and when you reach the source of the slowdown it’s just a fender bender pulled off to the side. But everyone slows down to look, we shouldn’t, we know it’s not good, but we do.

All we have is our personal choice. Read, listen, view, we can make our own personal choices as to where we want our own personal coverage to stop. But we need to be honest with ourselves, it’s hard NOT to embrace the beast. There is interest in disaster, there is entertainment in a train wreck. We have long left the age where public figures can expect or enjoy a certain amount of insulation from coverage. We are going to watch that plane land. If it lands safely, we can all breath a sigh of relief, but we watched and we all know why we did, because we slow down for car wrecks. It’s a marketable aspect of human nature and “News” reporting media knows this.

There is almost nothing sacred, given the scope of outlet that exists. In the past 10 years the only “story” that the major media seemed to back off was when Steve Irwin was tragically killed by the sting-ray. Evidently footage of his death exists. I haven’t gone looking for it, so maybe it is out there, but credit most of the media outlets for NOT seeking it out. Somewhere there is still a line we don’t cross but I’m afraid that line is fading. 2 days from now the plane landed safely won’t be a story, but had it crashed we’d be shown it for weeks, with commentary from “experts” as to what happened, why it happened and what should of happened.

You know what kind of BBQ sauce Brandon buys? And you’ve been holding out on us??

We hold former Blazers in such high regard. Look I know this isnt a popular opinion in these here parts, but I gotta be honest. Some of the stuff that the players get into isnt any different and often not NEARLY as offensive as stuff Blazer players in the past got into. It was a different time. We cared what they did on the court, not so much in their private life. When coverage for the Blazers was 2 reporters total and they were FRIENDS (i know canzano, get livid) with the players, many things went unreported. Even our precious 90s teams had their fair share of issues, but it was swept under the rug because it COULD be. There is no way in this current world of voyeurism that it could happen. I’ve seen 40yr old ex-players at a club taking home 18ish (im not POSITIVE they were that old) girls in the last decade, but because cell phone cameras werent prevalent and no one was blogging about it, it wasnt newsworthy.
This is one of those instances that reminds me of Klosterman and others (Dave youre in here too) discussing the rosy colored lenses we look back on. The good old days. At the time, they werent that good, we just didnt know any better, and it seems like things are worse now. In 15 years we will look fondly back on this time, even though it isnt that great now.
Unfortunately society has been conditioned to be blind to the line, and we cross it everyday. I know I’m guilty. Privacy died some time ago, and it is sorely missed.

I wouldn’t watch it ; I couldn’t. I don’t want to watch people die even if I don’t actually see THEM. It’s one of my recurring dreams … I am watching an airplane go down, but at the moment before impact I turn away. It’s not a fear of flying either, I’ve never hesitated to get on an airplane.

I doubt that the people on the plane are thinking about the whole world watching them. They are busy with their own prayers or whatever they might do when faced with death.

As far as showing the plane on the news … maybe run the tape after it lands safely (but what interest would there be then???) but not live. What if you knew someone on the plane? A loved one? Would you really want to watch then – to imagine the terror your father or son might be experiencing? Would you really want to watch? And would you want the rest of the world watching impersonally half hoping that it will crash so they can say “I saw it live?”

from the real news. People are so easily distracted from the scary things that truly matter.