The sports media has seen a dramatic evolution over the last several decades – to a point where today, it is out of control and Gilbert Arenas has become the latest tragic casualty.

There was a time when obscene events in the sporting world would see brief mention in a local paper, and disappear from memory soon thereafter – but that is now in the distant past. The 80’s was the start of the movement towards the increased importance of sports media in pop culture. Legendary players like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were defining what it meant to be a superstar and were gracing covers of magazines from Sports Illustrated to Time Magazine. The 90’s were all about Michal Jordan, and he single-handedly transformed the industry from being a sport to a form of entertainment. During this time, ESPN became a brand deeply imbedded within the DNA of sports with its highlights and opinions often becoming the apparent judge of success. The new millennium brought with it wide use of the internet, and thousands of Blogs were born everyday dissecting every small little topic humanly thinkable.

This rapid development of the sporting world and the way it has been covered has spiraled out of control – with plenty of reasons to explain how we have come where we are. Take the state of the media today: unprecedented competition with everyone having relatively equal access to finding and sharing information, the slow death of traditional media and its gasping effort to survive, and a fast drop in ethical standards. This landscape has resulted in everyone in the business blowing stories out of proportion and resorting to anything from lies to sensationalism, non factual rumors to biased opinions – in hopes of securing a piece of the pie.

If you’ve read this far down and are not sure what is wrong with the media today, perhaps a short recount of some recent stories might shed better light on the issue.

For example, Michael Vick went to jail and had his whole life destroyed because…he engaged in dog fighting. This isn’t exactly the right place to discuss the degree of severity of dog fighting – but I would personally place fighting (physically) with your wife on a higher level of evil. If you put together the suspensions of all these players with assault and battery histories (and believe me, there’s plenty), it wouldn’t come close to adding up to the losses both financially and emotionally that Vick has had to endure for his distasteful hobby.

Then you have Tiger Woods – his story probably received more media coverage than anything since 9/11. At the end of the day he was cheating on his wife – but last time I checked, the USA is not part of Saudi Arabia where such an act can be considered a crime worthy of being stoned. The amount of destruction the sheer amount of press coverage brought onto this previously angel of a human being resulted in an insurmountable and irrecoverable situation with his wife and family. The lost sponsorships were deserved, but complete loss of privacy and sensitivity in these private matters at times of crisis was a casualty of today’s media.

And this bring us to Gilbert Arenas – everything that could potentially have been written about him has been written. All his words have been published, his tweets followed, his list of pranks revealed, his interviews broadcasted, his thoughts and dreams shared, and everything you could ever want to know has been shoved down our throat by the media up to this point like it’s humanity’s shared child and we all need to know more about him than we know about our own family members. The same people who laughed at his jokes and wrote about how great he was now are using his pranks against him in explaining how he was a psycho megalomaniac bully.It wasn’t too long ago, the NBA even employed this guy themselves on their official website to write about all the crazy things going on in his mind – but following the gun incident Agent Zero, much like a spy who has gone offstray, got terminated.

What bothers me most is the breaking point came not as a result of his breaking the law but during a pre game huddle: the few seconds before a game where the leader of a team makes a final attempt to bond with his comrades before they go off to battle, like Spartacus in ancient times, like a King before his disciples, like a coach during a huddle. These speeches can be offensive, vulgar, downright offensive at times… but at the end of the day it’s none of our business what a core of individuals need to do to bond with each other. If you’re really looking for a punishment to teach a a lesson, you need to do it at the right time, right place, and right manner – and David Stern along with the Wizards organization dropped the ball on this one. If you’re going to completely break ties with someone, throw him off to the media wolves, do it correctly (that means doing something about Javaris Crittenton too).

Don’t get me wrong, what Gilbert Arenas did was wrong of course, and he needs to be punished. But his punishment should not be graver than the likes of Stephen Jackson, Laterell Sprewell, Delonte Jones, and Ron Artest. At the end of the day, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and Gilbert Arenas is not a killer. The United States’ recent gun problem, and the mentality of its people towards highly paid celebrities and investment bankers following the financial crisis made this an easy home run for the media to escalate the situation to its current heights. Now Arenas is facing 5 years in prison, a loss of 80 million dollars, completely abandonment from his long time sponsors and NBA team, and a life where tags like ‘thug’, ‘bully, ‘criminal’, ‘maniac’ will follow him and haunt him for the rest of his life. Does he really deserve this?

Arenas as a kid had a rough upbringing, being raised by his father in one of the most dangerous communities in the United States. He had to battle adversity, failure, being a complete nobody. He made himself a somebody, and there are countless stories of Arenas having a generous and kind soul and helping others. A few years ago, people in Washington would scoff at the idea of trading Gilbert Arenas for Kobe Bryant but today, the word on the street (hint: the media tells us) is that the Wizards have the worst contract in the league.

In fact there is some truth to that, but it is Arenas who has the worst contract in the league. You bring revolution to an age old industry by popularizing the idea of celebrity blogging, you take a battered team to their first playoff series win in years, you donate your time and money to the community, you give your heart and soul and spend 2 years trying to get back to form to help your team and in the snap of a second, a slip-up in judgment, you find yourself the biggest enemy in the nation after Osama bin Laden, and you’re threatened to have your livelihood taken away from you forever.

I urge those in the media to reconsider their approach and demeanor in this story. At times I have also been mad and frustrated with the behavior of Gilbert Arenas – but it is time for the media to step in and do the opposite of what it is normally trained and shaped to do:  it must make as little of this story as possible. The media, even if it is against all its interests, needs to kill this story, focus on the positives, and welcome him back to his rightful place in the NBA once he has served the punishment sentenced to him by the law.

Related posts:

1. Gilbert Arenas’ Gun
2. Gilbert Arenas: Prison or Jail Next?
3. How to Increase Athlete Performance
4. Charles Barkley Hosts SNL
5. Michael Jordan’s Last Shot

Tagged with: gilbert arenas innocent, save gilbert arenas, sports journalism, sports media

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