two minor cultural footnotes

In a previous blog, I mentioned that I also blog on christianblog.com, but, when I went to make an entry there for the first time in a while, I found that they changed their rules such that, after 25 blogs, one had to become a premier (that is, paid) member. Also, over the years, it has become harder for anyone not signed up as a member to even see the blogs, with the exception of a few that appeared on the home page. Therefore, I will not be blogging there. I must note that I have not posted anything there in a while.

The reason for going there in the first place was to update something I wrote about a year ago. For those of you who are not sports fans, ESPN has had a policy (not publicly admitted, to my knowledge) of directing on air talent to avoid mention of anything religious, in an extremely broad sense of the term. Some things came across quite weird, as the Rick Reilly Homecoming special on Kurt Warner that had no mention of his faith, or the note on the death a few months ago of baseball's Willie Davis, who at one point of his career strongly announced that his improvement on the field was connected to his adoption of practicing eastern meditation techniques, but mention of which was an odd gaping h*** in their coverage.

Anyway, it appears that, over the past few days, they have changed their policy and are allowing on air personnel to recognize that people they cover have beliefs and that at times that is a portion of they story that is being covered. I am saying that that is good only in the aspect that their previous policy was a kind of ridiculous sensorship, which I might say was far more restrictive than their parent company ABC practices. Congratulations to some unknown executive on coming a little closer to the real world.