Thursday, April 14, 2005

Revisiting Mitch Albom II

A column in the Detroit Metro Times really slams Mitch Albom, this time for his lame apology.

One point of interest in all this is Albom’s attempt to downplay the sificance of his transgression. “You can’t write that something happened that didn’t, even if it’s just who sat in the stands,” Albom wrote in his apology. “Perhaps it seems a small detail to you — the players still love their teams, they are still nostalgic, they simply decided not to go after the column had been filed — but details are the backbone of journalism, and planning to be somewhere is not the same as being
there.”

Small detail? It’s as if there would’ve been no problem had the two players simply attended the game.

In the opinion of News Hits, that’s not the real issue. This is: Albom wrote a piece intentionally designed to deceive his readers. Even if Cleaves and Richardson had made the game as planned, Albom’s column would’ve been built on the implicit lie that he was there watching the action with them, talking to the players as the game unfolded, recording the conversation. [Emphasis added]


Ouch.

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