Now that Donald Sterling has been banned and fined by the National Basketball Association, perhaps it is the appropriate time to step back from the moral outrage of this episode and take a good look at what the media’s reaction says about ourselves.
With lightening speed, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver took action against Sterling because he faced pressure from the public and from the NBA Players Association, which threatened the ongoing, highly lucrative league playoffs. But where were Silver and his predecessor, David Stern, in 2006 and again in 2009 when Sterling was charged by the Justice Department with discriminatory practices in his real estate business? For that matter, Sterling had a history of bigoted, on-the-record public comments. Where was the outrage then? Why were the media silent?
It took a tawdry TMZ report about a recorded private conversation to generate public ire. This surreptitious recording captured by Sterling’s publicity-hungry mistress became mainstream news and dominated the mass media for days.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the greatest basketball professionals of all time, may have summed it up best in an Op-Ed article published in Time. He wrote:
“Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that (Sterling’s) private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.”
Yes, Sterling’s comments were despicable and he deserves to be vilified, even banned. Yet this is the type of news that once would have been dubbed “tabloid journalism” and would never have appeared in respectable news media. Today, it is a front-page story in every American newspaper and lead story on every broadcast network.
Coverage of this very sad incident says as much about our society as it does about the evils of discrimination. When prurient interests overpower important societal concerns, it may be time for reassessment of our priorities.
