“Tiger Woods” has existed for a number of years not as an independent human personality, but as a commodity, portions of which have been purchased by various concerns. Nike owns one part, Procter & Gamble (Gillette) owns another...When Woods is revealed, in effect, to be a human being, this creates difficulties for his sponsors and patrons...
The American media outlets play a pernicious role in building up sports stars and entertainers into larger-than-life figures. They sell airtime, magazines and newspapers by inflating fallible human beings with special skills-—or sometimes no skills at all-—into demigods. They always hold in reserve, however, their right to destroy such personalities, also selling products in that process, playing on the population’s ambivalent relationship to highly-paid athletes, Hollywood stars and pop musicians. Celebrity worship always contains within it elements of envy and barely suppressed resentment, which the media attempts to manipulate given the proper circumstances.
However, the leading print publications, tabloid or otherwise, and television networks in the US continually sink deeper into the mire. They can’t help themselves, nor do they want to, despite their occasional breast-beating. The media has economic and political motives for the pursuit of the sensational, and there is, moreover, the fact that its leading personnel (conglomerate executives, news department chiefs, television anchorpeople, leading reporters) are thoroughly corrupt and themselves obsessed with the prurient.
The other side of the coin, of course, is hypocritical piety... An episode like the current one involving Woods gives them the occasion to offer sage advice on how one should lead one’s life...
William Rhoden of the New York Times penned one of the most objectionable pieces, whose headline—“Time for Woods to Put a Face on the Apology”—-sums up its general slant. Rhoden criticizes Woods’s unwillingness to this point to make a public mea culpa...and instructs him on the kind of statement he should issue: “I apologize—to my wife, to my children, to my parents, to the PGA Tour, to sponsors, to the legion of Tiger Woods fans, who I know are stunned and disappointed. In the process of cheating on you, I have cheated myself...”
What Woods should do is tell the media and the sports world to go to hell, but, unfortunately, that is probably his least likely course of action.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/tige-d16.shtml
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