The Decision (Lebron James)

In one hour we saw one of the most hyped and produced hour long sports shows in the history of sports. "The Decision" was an hour long show that aired in July and it was Lebron James ending his free agency and deciding which team he was going to go to next year. The advertising and the hype for his decision was so high that they had to make a television show. Really? I think that Lebron has let his ego get the best of him when it comes to this. That's just my opinion. I could have cared less where he went to. But I am not here to discuss Lebron James himself in this blog. I am going to speak about how the journalists made this whole thing out to be for really the last month. Lately, the only thing that sports journalists' have been concentrating on has been Lebron, Lebron, and Lebron...It seems like every time you put on ESPN that is all they speak about. Lebron this, Lebron that. It seems like they only gave dedicated time to something like the World Cup only when there was a game on. I understand that it's a dead time for sports but honestly find something else! For the two days prior to the decision, they basically had news reporters sleeping by his house and around the city of Cleveland speculating not reporting news. This was the first thing that I found to be wrong with this whole situation. Everything was speculated. You don't report news by speculating. If thats what they call news reporting, my seven year old cousin could probably do that. I even could have made something up that would have sold to the people. Don't keep us up to date on speculations. Only inform us of the facts. Then comes the show. He don't make his decision until a half hour into it. OK, fine. After he makes his decision it was like everybody in America wanted to and still does want to kill this guy unless you were a Miami resident. Journalists barely stood in Miami were they were making him out to be the good guy. Instead of standing in Miami, they went right into the heart of Cleveland (I give them credit for that) and just got footage of this guy being made out to be a villian. People were freaking out loittering the city, burning his jersey, etc.. Eugene Robinson had a good quote in his article in the Washington Post. "Why is everybody hating on Lebron? I mean, is this a free country? Or did a couple of important amendments to the Constitution get repealed while nobody was looking?" (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/07/lebron_james_and_the_american.html) I thought it was funny because it really is alot of negativity this guy is taking for making a normal move. The journalists are making him out to be the worst guy on the planet. One example out of the many is the article written by Mark Kriegel from Fox Sports and it was titled "Lebron's New Reality: He's the Villian Now". (http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/lebron-james-the-villain-now-mark-kriegel-070910) In this article he basically broke down all of the negative things about him leaving and how this was all about him being hubris, arrogant. By journalists' bringing him out to be this "bad guy" it is going to cause a lot of problems and for Lebron, the uncomfortable of traveling to away games. This is what journalists' do and this is what I am trying to state in this blog. Journalists go out to the worst places possible and show all the worst things our country has to offer and they do it by basically copying the emotions showed at the scene so they can sell there story more. At the end of the day the victims and the person who made the action (whether right or wrong) is made out to be bad people or just a place were negativity flows at a constant rate. Why don't journalists' look at the postives of situations like this. He's moving on to a team where he could possibly win a championship and it can be good for the league. No journalist in the last month has seemed to have brought that up. It's all about what the fans of Cleveland are doing in the aftermath of this. Journalists need to bring out more postive things in the news. They bring out the negative things to make us scared and make us more cautious in the hopes that we invest in a bunch of things that we really don't need and it's all just to assist in keeping the money flowing in our country. Journalism at the end of the day is just another word for promoting.