Don't buy the martyrdom.
Because Dallas' Only Daily is selling you a knock-off.
Darrell Walker/UTHM/Icon SMI
Mark Cuban's ban on bloggers drew the ire of the NBA.
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In an ironic twist, turns out Dallas Morning News reporter Tim MacMahon got himself temporarily banned from the Dallas Mavericks' locker room because, in part, he failed to go into the Dallas Mavericks' locker room.
The Morning News would like you to believe that MacMahon, its hard-working, omnipresent blogger, is a martyr who valiantly fell on his cyber-sword as the catalyst for owner Mark Cuban's virtual line in the blogosphere. The paper repeatedly trumpeted MacMahon as singularly persecuted, ostensibly for having the balls to write a negative item about the Mavericks. Morning News deputy managing editor Bob Yates protested Cuban's infamous March 10 blogger ban, characterizing the unprecedented policy as "a veiled attempt at retribution" for MacMahon's criticism of head coach Avery Johnson.
If that were true, it'd be petty of the Mavs. If that were true, it'd be hyper-sensitive of Cuban.
It ain't true. Close? Maybe. But 100 percent genuine? Nope.
Because during a three-week circle jerk in which the Morning News canonized MacMahon and elicited harrumphs from the mainstream media mush, the paper conveniently left out the Jerry Stackhouse incident.
Which one? This one.
On February 25-26, MacMahon penned items on the Morning News Mavs blog stating Stackhouse had long been grousing about his role on the team. "No more wondering what his role is or complaining about not being able to get in a rhythm," MacMahon wrote on the 26th. Stackhouse, a Mavs info junkie, fired off an angry e-mail to the writer he'd never met.
"The problem I had was that it wasn't accurate," Stackhouse said before Dallas' March 25 home game against the Los Angeles Clippers. "Without talking to me, he portrayed me in a way which was just wrong. So I let him know I was pissed off."
Before Dallas hosted the Sacramento Kings February 29—the night after Johnson benched Jason Kidd for the final 34 seconds of a gut-wrenching, head-scratching loss to the San Antonio Spurs—the doo-doo collided with the oscillating Deco Breeze.
While Cuban—alerted to MacMahon's criticism of Johnson from the night before—discussed the merits of blogging during his traditional Stairmaster session with reporters about 20 feet away, MacMahon approached Stackhouse's locker with hat, and blog, in hand.
"He said I was right, and he apologized," Stackhouse said. "I told him to stop trying to read my mind or determine how I'm feeling. He agreed. He said he should've come in here and asked me about it first. In the end, we were cool. To me it was quashed right there."
Hardly.
A locker-room source said that when MacMahon joined the group surrounding Cuban, other Morning News reporters were essentially admitting they could write information on the blog that wouldn't be allowed in the paper.
"Mark was like, 'There's a big problem right there'," the source said. "You could see his wheels starting to spin."
Cuban told MacMahon to leave the locker room, promising to craft a policy concerning bloggers. During ensuing discussions with team personnel, Cuban was informed of the Stackhouse incident. MacMahon was prohibited from entering Dallas' locker room at American Airlines Center before games on March 6 and 8, and on March 10, the team formally announced a blanket ban that later barred bloggers Andrew Kamenetzky (Los Angeles Times) and Henry Abbott (ESPN.com's TrueHoop).
"It's not like I was losing sleep over it, because I put bloggers down on the level of a rash," Stackhouse said. "But I thought there was something funny about the timing of it all."
Cuban, a founding father of blogging who has his own blog but claims he never knew of MacMahon's site before February 29, refuses to pin the ordeal's genesis on a single item.
"It wasn't about Avery. It wasn't about Stack," Cuban told me last week via e-mail. "It was the fact that I had no idea that any bloggers at all were allowed in. When I found out there were bloggers, the one thing that was important to me was that mainstream media have no advantage over individual bloggers. Lack of space was a convenient excuse."
For us to think the Stackhouse item didn't play a factor in Cuban's decision, we'd have to be nuttier than Sandra Crenshaw.
For a newspaper to camouflage the incident, it would have to be deceptive and misleading, flirting with untruthful.
I'd love to give you the Morning News' excuse. But, ironically, the guy who blogs constantly off the top of his head from the middle of his couch suddenly went mute. MacMahon failed to return multiple phone calls last week. (In a peculiar "Pub for the blog; Anonymity for the blogger" positioning, multiple sources say MacMahon is ordered to decline all interview requests.) Morning News sports editor Garry Leavell also refused comment and directed me to Yates, who was out of town and unavailable.
The only time the Morning News publicly acknowledged the MacMahon-Stackhouse incident was Yates' interview with TrueHoop posted March 24.
"Tim MacMahon and Jerry Stackhouse had a conversation in the locker room on [February 29], before Mark Cuban told MacMahon to leave the locker room," Yates told Abbott. "Tim left his conversation with Stackhouse thinking the issue was resolved."
