Dan Le Batard--"New journalism is degraded by public’s demand"

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There appears to be a fascinating sexual tension growing between old journalism and new journalism. A startled and exposed Tiger Woods discovered this the hard way, when both journalisms barged into his bedroom together with a kind of zeal that had no precedent in American sports. The younger generation, led by peer idols like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, is less repressed, less inhibited and less interested in previous rules of decency and decorum. New journalism is more voyeuristic, more reckless and more entitled. The marketplace wants, craves, lusts for naked gossip, and the result is Sports America keeps peeping in on the famous even if it means trampling the not famous, and fairness, in the breathless need to make private — and privates — public.

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The marketplace has spoken, so journalism shifts, by choice, by demand. Somebody will give the public what it craves, whether it is in politics or porn, because it is ultimately the journalism business, not the journalism charity. Young people and their word-of-mouth is what makes almost anything popular, so the choice for old people is to either follow or get left behind. Oh, you can object. You can tell the kids to get he hell off your damn lawn. But you and your sensibilities will die first, and the last sounds you will hear before expiring is the kids and their echoing laughter.

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There is the feeling that a divorced and broken Tiger Woods should have been more discrete, should have known better. But he couldn’t have. The rules changed on him, and for all sports figures, while he was getting undressed. And the lines journalism once wasn’t willing to cross keep getting blurred or moved by our nation’s TMZ-ization.

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Let me tell you a story. John Amaechi of the Utah Jazz became my friend while I was working on a magazine piece on him. He eventually revealed to me, while still playing, that he was gay. I kept his secret even though it would have been a huge story. This was complicated as a journalist, but it wasn’t as a human. I can be accused of protecting him, of being biased, of not doing my job. He decided to come out after he was done playing. It would have been wrong to ruin or betray him, obviously. But it would have been rewarded, and never more so than today.

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