Nick and Shaun had their ethical issues presentation the other day asking the question of whether or not the media should be allowed to intrude the personal lives of athletes. I think the media should be restricted to as how far they can go when trying to get a story or take the next big time picture of a celebrity doing something wrong. It gets to the point where an athlete can’t even sit down in a restaurant and enjoy time with their families because once they walk in or out pictures are being taken. The problem is the average Joe wants to see celebrities or athletes fall from the ranks of high society because we paint this picture of them as being a role model and when they do not live up to it society loves coming down on them. We need to realize that even though they are athletes and people do look up to them, they are people as well and people make mistakes. I have made plenty of mistakes in my life that I have learned from but the only people who know about it are the ones around me. For an athlete, if they make a mistake the whole country knows about it. Sometimes I think it gets to the point where some athletes are not themselves because their PR representative or organization does not want them getting into to trouble or saying the wrong thing. Money is usually lost in some way when something comes up with an athlete.
Then you have things happening like athletes houses getting broken into because the media does some story about how big their house is and what is in it. Incidents like Sean Taylor getting killed while getting robbed might not have happened. The problem is I do not think this problem with the media intruding lives of athletes can be stopped. The reason being is with everyone having a cell phone with a camera on it everyone becomes part of the media. You look at Matt Leinhart’s pictures with the beer bong and Michael Phelps smoking bong, those pictures were taken by people like you and me who probably got a nice sum of money from the media so they could publish the story. If anything athletes will have to be even more cautious of their actions outside of their home because you never know who might be out there trying to ruin the athletes life by taking a picture of something an average person may have done but because they are athletes it is worth money and money always talks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
One of the problems for athletes who have trained all their lives to be professionals in their field is that few are probably taught how to handle the fame that may come their way at a very young age. I wanted to respond to your statement: "Sometimes I think it gets to the point where some athletes are not themselves because their PR representative or organization does not want them getting into to trouble or saying the wrong thing." I wanted to use Agassi's autobiography as an example because he wrote about how he filmed the ad for Canon commercials in which the "Image is everything" tag line was used. When he made the ad, he had no idea how it would be turned against him by fans and media members. And he was probably still a teen-ager when all of that happened. In the case of juniors, there ought to be someone to advocate for protection of these athletes.
ReplyDelete