Are you ready for some football? OK, are you ready for twice as much football? The NFL is planning a Giants/Saints, Cowboys/’Skins doubleheader on Monday September 19 and despite the league’s promise to use the evening’s airtime for fundraising efforts, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg is filled with gloom.
Dignity and the league do not always go hand in hand as witnessed by the Janet Jackson affair. For the twin television networks (and others that surely will be involved as the season progresses), there is a fine line between trying to rescue a team’s schedule and trying to exploit it.
The raising of funds — assuming there is a monitored way to do so — is a worthy endeavor for the NFL. People have died by the thousands — most of them poor … many of them, sadly enough, used to exploitation.
It’s a chance for the NFL to do a public service. It’s also a chance for television to do a public service.
Keep it in perspective.
Don’t let too many self-serving manufactured horns, bells and whistles push it across the line between a necessary exercise in hope and a grotesque study in breast-beating self-aggrandizement that overwhelms the genuine need.
Huh. Why should the music industry have a monopoly on the breast-beating self-aggrandizement?