Adam Clark Blackistone/Eschrich Post

I know I discussed the Blackistone article in my post last week, but I will reiterate my points from then. As far as a white dominated news room goes, yes it is undoubtedly white, but his article mentions nothing about interest from minorities and does not give numbers on how many applications to newsroom positions were put in by minorities. The athletes that get scrutinized most are the ones that call attention to themselves. Terrel Owens, DeSean Jackson and Meta World Peace (Ron Artest) are just some of those characters. And guess what, they are all black athletes in black man dominated professions and they all called attention to themselves whenever they do something big. It gets reported on and possibly scrutinized because of the way they go about their business. You rarely see a white athlete doing antics like you see those that I just named do. The only recent white athlete that I can think of that was scrutinized for what he did by the media is Ben Roethlisberger. So I do not know where Blackistone is going with his article, but I do think he needs to open his eyes and see that it's not such a racist world of sports that we live in.

As far as the Eschrich paper goes, I enjoyed it. I do not personally follow anything Bill Simmons does, but he seems to have his stuff together and is portrayed as a composed and complete journalist as they all should be. By maintaining his level of professionalism that Eschrich discusses, he is able to draw in more fans because he isn't being portrayed as a white man out to get the black man and sets a standard of how a complete journalist works. By avoiding locker rooms he can't put bias in his pieces and won't feel bad if he needs to trash someone based off their play because he doesn't know them personally. By putting a lot of thought in his work, using old quotes and references, he challenges to the reader to really understand what he's talking about. He is sort of like the conventional journalist of old that everyone feels are gone; the kind that wrote long 4000 word stories and took more than one day to do a piece, If more journalists followed his model of how he goes about his profession, the advancement of journalism could be for the better and brighter.

For my paper I would like to write about the medias coverage of Barry Bonds and his steroid trial. This was something I was always interested in hearing about and followed as closely as I could. I think I will definitely be able to match three of the nine cultural functions of journalism to this story as it dominated news headlines for years. There will be plenty of different types of media pieces out there that I would be able to use to help my paper along. Steroids have been a big issue for a while and Bonds has easily been the most prominent figure in this "cheating" scandal that has plagued baseball for years now.