While new media web sites like TMZ and SPORTSbyBROOKS are having a field day covering the Tiger Woods affair rumors and the questions surrounding his recent accident, old media (or mainstream media) outlets are having a little more trouble with it. I watched a news story on ABC over the weekend after the accident in which the affair rumors, Rachel Uchitel and the possibility that Tiger’s wife Elin Nordegren lied to police about the accident were not even mentioned.
James Poniewozik from Time.com has an interesting take on the dilemma facing the MSM.
And, of course, like any media issue today, it’s complicated by money. Or the lack thereof. Journalism organizations (like Time Inc.) are losing revenue and shedding jobs left and right. How much attention can we afford to pass up in the name of purity?
So whenever a story like the Woods story emerges, one of the most entertaining aspects is watching the contortions the respectable media go through to put a sufficiently meta spin on it, to justify covering the hot topic (and not passing up all those free eyeballs), while appearing to be serious-minded, and not like all those other outlets just trying to pry into Tiger Woods’ personal life.
Like so many things that the trapped-in-between mainstream media does nowadays, though, this probably does it little good in the long run. They don’t truly satisfy, for instance, the reader who just Google-searched “Tiger Woods golf club affair car crash,” and wanted to learn something new about the incident. Meanwhile, to anyone who expects them to ignore this kind of story and focus on “real news,” their game is transparent.
What these half-measures do, more than anything, is convey the sense that the mainstream media is phony, inauthentic, that it lacks the courage of its convictions either to go all in and give the public what it wants, or take a bullet and stick to its principles. Trying to please everyone, it pleases no one.
That said, hope springs eternal in the mainstream media that there is a way of properly threading the needle when it comes to juicy stories like this one—that if they are simply self-aware and meta-referential enough, acknowledging these contortions will make the contortions somehow more acceptable.
In many ways he’s dead on here. But he also fails to mention one factor that doesn’t apply to Time but applies to the television networks. Tiger Woods is more than just a famous athlete. He’s a brand; he’s a multi-million dollar business; he’s a global icon. For the networks there’s a price to be paid for pissing of Tiger (and Nike as well). So while Time and other old media magazines might wrestle with how to handle this, the decision is a bit easier for the big television networks. They’ll be happy to bring up the rear on this story.
