I sent this to ESPN's ombudsman this morning.
To take nothing away from the mission of an organiZation [when I sent this to espn.com it had the spelling error of a missing Z. I'm an idiot.] like Make-A-Wish or from the generosity of the players involved, it seems like ESPN's participation in orchestrating meetings between children and their athletic heroes represented a HUGE potential ethical mine field journalistically. How can ESPN be expected to be fair with a Tedy Bruchsi (who personally I admire as a contemporary of his at Arizona) or any of the athletes who participated? I assume individual ESPN reporters to be beyond allowing these corporately produced "stories" to affect their newsgathering, nevertheless, as a former newspaper reporter I understand as well as anyone that perception is reality, and ESPN has clearly opened itself up to fair questioning about its reportorial objectivity. Thanks for the time. Great column!
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