February 12, 2007
The Eklund File Gets Thicker
Last Wednesday, Paul Kukla went public with a piece of chicanery committed by Eklund in a discussion string at Kukla's Korner. It's probably important to note that when a Los Angeles Times columnist did the same thing, it nearly cost him his job.
On Saturday, JJ Guerrero, official in house blogger with the Vancouver Canucks, took Canada's SportsNet to task for making Eklund a part of their trade deadline show:
Despite the advances bloggers and the internet have made in the last couple of years, the mainstream media, regardless of format, are still held to a higher standard of accountability; Sportsnet’s approach comes nowhere close to meeting this standard.
And now, today, more confirmation that Eklund's success is coming at the expense of bloggers who are doing things the hard way. Here's Alanah Downie:
But credibility is a complicated issue, as every hockey blogger knows. Most of the NHL’s teams have been slow to recognize the value of fan-created media, often making it unreasonably difficult to do the jobs that most do for free, for love of the game and the pleasure of their readers. And there are many reasons for that… but one of those reasons is definitely Eklund.
I barely even knew who Eklund was the first time I got rejected for media credentials with the Canucks (early last season), but rumors and comments from friends who knew better—in the mainstream sports media and in the NHL offices themselves—made it clear why bloggers were in a particularly bad spot: Eklund. The feeling was that the lies they could confirm (that he definitely did NOT have the connections back then that he claimed, nor the background in hockey that he insisted he had) made them distrust accountability from hockey bloggers.
Apparently, Eklund pulled the same stunt with Alanah that he pulled with Kukla back when Alanah was running Vancouver Canucks Op Ed. What a joke. And the joke gets bigger everyday.
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06:48 PM