To say Jeremy Lin’s rise to stardom has been remarkable would be an enormous understatement.
Within days, the New York Knicks’ backup point guard emerged from the bench and became the most prominent athlete in pro sports.
Lin rallied the slumping Knicks to seven straight victories and scored more points in his first five NBA starts than any other player in history.
It’s like the Tim Tebow story all over again. Both players put struggling teams on their backs and, despite being the heavy underdogs, they found a way to win. One can’t help but think divine intervention had something to do with it, considering Lin and Tebow are both devout Christians.
Miracle or not, Lin’s success has given everyone a place to turn after Tebow’s Broncos were eliminated from the NFL playoffs.
If you thought everyone was tired of relentless media hype surrounding a religious underdog athlete finding success, you were wrong.
The world has gone absolutely bananas for Lin and the media have proven once again that they will stretch this great, inspiring story into anything they can as long as it’s a moneymaker, even if it loses sight of Lin’s achievements.
First came the bizarre array of Lin puns, as the linderella story spread through social media at a rapid pace to a lincredible amount of people.
The hype was linvincable and in no time, Lin became the flavour of the month.
When the linsanity arrived in Canada, five games into his epic run, Lin buried a game-winning three pointer against the Toronto Raptors with less than a second remaining, sending the crowd into utter chaos.
Everyone wants a piece of Jeremy Lin. In a mere matter of days, his jersey became the NBA’s top seller, Nike released his own line of shoes, Ben and Jerry’s named an ice cream flavour after him, multiple biographies and books were given the go-ahead and out came Jeremy Lin online video games and iPhone apps.
Millions of dollars worth of Lin merchandise has been generated and exchanged in less than a month.
Media coverage has been explosive. Lin has appeared on more than 20 consecutive covers of Newsday sports, two consecutive covers of Sports Illustrated, the cover of Time magazine, has been the subject of sports columns around the world for weeks now and even people who barely knew him in college are now the subjects of news stories.
The buzz generated from the aftermath of Lin’s emergence is not surprising.
Media outlets are businesses that aim to produce the most popular content for their audiences, and there is no doubt that Jeremy Lin is the ultimate story that everyone wants to consume.
The problem is it’s come to the point where the attention is less focused on praising Lin’s accomplishments, but rather exploiting the story for every dollar its worth.
Media outlets are trying to provide catchy pun headlines and alluring details about Lin’s character to fabricate more buzz and consequently sell their content.
So far, some of the consequences include ESPN posting a racist headline referring to Lin’s Asian heritage, established sports columnists criticizing Lin for his very public displays of his Christianity and tabloids gossiping about juicy details regarding his personal life.
The coverage has severely watered down the true news value of the Jeremy Lin saga, which was his ability to overcome all the odds through his determination and passion for the game of basketball and establish himself as an important member of the New York Knicks.
The transformation of the news coverage to wacky and harmful material has become an unfortunate reality in this day and age, as we saw with Tebow earlier this year.
The coverage has fortunately yet to ruin Lin and his heroics, but it’s only a matter of time.