Okay, I know it's only Monday, but I'm breaking out the ONSOTW award anyhow. I don't suspect this one will be matched, and if it is, I'm okay with handing out two this week, since we'd gone a few weeks without one.
If you follow sports and were paying any kind of attention today, you probably know where this is going. Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months in prison this morning as a result of his guilty plea in his federal dogfighting case. Speculation had been that Vick would be given 12-18 months, but due to a series of missteps throughout the process, the prosecutors recommended 18-24 months, and the judge went with the high end.
The first thing I will say is that this is not a "true" non-story. The Vick story was a worthy story back in August, despite the way in which it was dramatically overblown. This was a final resolution to this story (at least until Vick is released and makes his inevitable attempt to return to the NFL), and thus was noteworthy. It merited headlines, and mention on talk radio.
What it clearly did not merit, in my opinion, was being the lead story on ESPN.com, dominating almost 2 hours of Dan Patrick's radio show, the first hour of Jim Rome's show, and what I can only assume was similar treatment throughout other areas of the media. There was very little new here. We've known for months that Vick was going to jail - in fact he turned himself in early to get a jump on his time, so he was already in jail. The length of time was a little bit surprising, but hardly out of line with initial expectations, and should have been fairly easy to predict given the sentences handed down to his co-defendants.
All of that said, it was noteworthy, and I could have seen it being worthy of dominating discussion on say, a Wednesday, in the middle of a light sports week. But this came down first thing in the morning on a Monday, after a full sports weekend, which included a full slate of late season NFL games, the presentation of the Heisman trophy, an NBA player being involved in a shooting, and a high profile boxing match, among other things. There was plenty of other news to talk about, and a large portion of it went either undiscussed, or only briefly mentioned. On top of that, it wasn't as if they were really discussing the sentencing on the radio - the sentencing was merely another excuse to rehash all the discussions that had been beaten into the ground a few months back - "Will Vick ever play again? Should he be allowed to play again? If he plays again, will it be at quarterback? Who might give him a chance?" There was nothing new in the treatment of it, and nothing has changed in those discussions in the last several months.
I can only hope that once things die down again, this will be the last I have to hear about this whole story until sometime in '09. That seems highly unrealistic though. There's bound to be some sort of prison altercation or some other incident that will give the media an excuse to spin on this one some more prior to Vick's release.
9 months ago
4 comments:
Even I heard about the whole thing on regular Talk Radio news and I thought of you and wondering what you were thinking. Haha. :)
When Dan Patrick wouldn't move off the point for like the first two hours, it was easily the most motivated I've been to call in to a show since I started listening to sports talk again.
Unfortunately I don't think that would go over well at work.
By the way, it looks like you were right and I was (mostly) wrong about Taylor. It seems like (according to the Miami Herald), the four burglars were tipped off to Taylor's house as a good target by a friend of Taylor's who was bragging about his wealth. All the evidence is that the burglars were quite surprised that Taylor was home and were expecting the house to be empty. Having a number of friends with unsavory connections probably raised the odds for Taylor's being targeted, but the actual incident could have happened to just about anybody.
It is not my sense that this realization is changing the coverage much, but you're vastly more tuned in to the sports media than I am.
I've got to say, though, that I like your theory about crime coverage involving famous people. If I'm summarizing it correctly, you're saying we're more interested when the famous person is a perpetrator of the crime, rather than a victim. Now that you mention it, I think that might be right.
Well, to be fair, I never really said that the assumptions in the Taylor case were incorrect, just that they were in fact, assumptions, and that it was unfair to Taylor to undermine his "victimhood" based only on assumptions. Quite frankly, I was surprised a bit myself when the assumptions did turn out to be false.
I would say you are correct that the realization didn't change the coverage much, because there wasn't much coverage still going on when the realization hit. By the time facts came out, the media had moved on to a large degree, so the facts only got passing mention on most of the outlets I track with. That's the danger when the media rushes to judgment - if the story in question isn't hot enough to keep in the forefront until the facts come out, the facts often don't get the same kind of hearing that the original assumption did.
Richard Jewell went to his grave with a large percentage of the population believing him to be the man behind the Centennial Park bombings at the Atlanta Olympics, when he in fact was a hero of those events. He was the first one listed as a suspect immediately after the bombings, and the media jumped on it, despite there never being anything of substance. He was cleared of wrongdoing a couple months later, received a public apology from the Attorney General, and Eric Rudolph has since been convicted of the crime, but all of that happened long after the media had moved elsewhere. Jewell was the only one who was ever implicated while the public eye was squarely on the case.
I'm certainly not saying that Taylor's case was similar in the level of injustice from the media, just highlighting an extreme case of where things can go wrong if the media frames coverage around assumption rather than fact.
Your mention of my theory on crime coverage got my juices flowing, and once again, rather than bury some thoughts I have in the comments, I'll be writing another entry shortly.
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