Deadmarsh Blog - Removed?!?

Howdy! With the Stanley Cup playoffs in the history books, we enter the slowest time of the year for a hockey fan. Luckily, we have baseball to get us through these tough months... unless you are a Rockies fan, when this season will henceforth be known as The Time of Great Drinking. Sigh.

There will likely be very few articles in the Denver Post about the Avalanche in the upcoming months, which might make it easier for Grading Dater to keep up with them, but seeing as how we've already established the next few months will be some sort of vicious bender waiting for hockey to return, I wouldn't count on it. But anyway, on with the show...

When you're an assistant coach for a hockey team,
you give up your right to privacy. Read the constitution! 

Today's entry is a curiosity: a blog entry that no longer exists. The reasons WHY it no longer exists we can only speculate, but it very likely indicates that Dater has stepped over the line of journalistic integrity and ethics once again. Not long after writing a blog in which he flirted with shady journalism by essentially reporting what he was (apparently) told off-the-record about Deadmarsh and Lefebvre returning to the Avalanche coaching staff, Dater posted an article explaining that Adam Deadmarsh had, in fact, stepped down from his position "for personal reasons" and accepted another, behind-the-scenes position with the team (Dater ended up oh-for-two on his "Deadmarsh and Lefebvre set to return" prediction, as this blog indicates that Lefebvre has accepted a head coaching position for the Canadiens' AHL affiliate).

When somebody says that they are doing something for personal reasons, I think 99% of the population realizes that what they're saying is that they do not really want those reasons discussed publicly. That doesn't mean that those 99% of people aren't curious about it and won't gossip and speculate, but it's a pretty safe bet that those people aren't newspaper journalists with the power to completely ruin that person's wishes to remain private just by tapping a few buttons. Adrian Dater IS a newspaper journalist, and even on his blog he has a greater responsibility to the privacy of those he covers than you and I do when we're sitting at the bar discussing hockey rumors and stuff.




Only a couple days after the article explaining that Deadmarsh would not return to the Avalanche bench, Dater posted a blog explaining the true reason why Deader and his family reached this decision. Dater evidently heard this information from Mrs Deadmarsh's Facebook page, and decided to go ahead and post it on the All Things Avs blog. The blog couldn't have been up more than a few hours before it mysteriously disappeared, which is a pretty strong indicator that Deader and his family did NOT authorize Dater to disclose the information he did. As I recall, the blog even included something like (and I'm paraphrasing from memory, here), "Deadmarsh would never want this to be public knowledge." Yet Dater, in his rush to scoop and be re-tweeted throughout the hockey world, went ahead and made it public, anyway. Wonderful.

If Dater published this blog without Deadmarsh's permission, then he should be ashamed of himself, and the Denver Post should be ashamed for letting him continue this sort of thing. Once you release something into the internet, you can't just retract it: the reasons behind Deader's resignation are all over the place now, and those "personal reasons" are now public. Deadmarsh's and his family's desire for privacy have been ruined by a careless (some would say reckless) "mistake" by a reporter who evidently doesn't take the ethics of his job seriously. I don't understand how a reporter even maintains his inroads with players after something like this -- if Deader and his wife can't trust this man, why should anybody else?

Now, maybe it's not as clear-cut as all that... perhaps Mrs Deader OK'd the blog, but changed her mind later, or she OK'd it without talking to her husband first. Even if that's the case, though, Dater's rush to get this out there in blog form, rather than doing the legwork an actual news article would require, has harmed a private man. Take the time to make a call to Deadmarsh himself, and make sure he's entirely OK with you making public the "personal reasons" he mentioned just a couple days earlier... or else don't publish it at all.

An F is not a low enough grade for this blog. Even a zero would indicate only that it accomplished nothing... the grade for this noxious blog entry should be some sort of penalty.