Game Six of the 2008 NBA Finals was painful enough as it was.  After a night spent weeping softly and dreaming of Andrew Bynum’s return, I thought perhaps I could wake up Wednesday morning and try to get on with my life.  Then I made the mistake of glancing at an LA Times stand on the way to breakfast.  On the cover was an article by Bill Plaschke, the headline of which read, “MVP?  More Like MIA.”  Uh, good one?  Plaschke’s known for being a blowhard when it comes to Kobe, but I was surprised when I picked the paper up to find that the sports section was covered with biting criticism, not just of the Lakers’ admittedly terrible play, but of their will, their personalities, and their character.

Is that the role of a local media outlet?  I mean, it would be one thing if they were raging on as hurt and disappointed fans (we’ve all been there, and we were all there Tuesday night), or even as gamblers who expected the Lakers to win and had just lost their mortgage.  But instead there were some truly mean character attacks that read more like scathing book reviews, unemotional evaluations of these players as though they were merely malfunctioning pieces of a machine.

Maybe I’m just used to covering prep and college sports, where athletes are acknowledged as real people, who have a job to do, a job they perform with varying degrees of success.  We delight in the victories of Aaron Hicks or Jasmine Dixon, but if they choke, I’m not going to sit down and mock their legitimate achievements of the prior season, the way Plaschke did.  Granted, Hicks and Dixon aren’t making millions of dollars (yet), but should someone being paid what the free market values their services at be punished for that fact?

Kobe Bryant, as far as I’ve heard (and like most Southern California residents, I’ve heard plenty from Kobe) has never invited a comparison between Michael Jordan and himself.  But sportswriters went ahead and wrote those comparisons, hoping to seem prescient, or to boost circulation.  Then, when Kobe couldn’t live up to those—impossible—comparisons, they act personally betrayed, as though his fallibility does their career a disservice.  Why?  When we see an athlete on a pedestal, what makes us want to watch him fall, to pull him down when he’s up there on our strength as much as his own?

And, more importantly, isn’t a local media outlet supposed to promote and further the community, as opposed to trying to drive wedges into it?