I felt this post to be very fitting today; those of you who may have seen me parading around this blog with the name "Ron Mexico" and may have not gotten my pop cultural reference. You may have perhaps thought it was a pornstar, or maybe something else. But with the sentencing of Mike "Ron Mexico" Vick today on counts of dog fighting, I feel as if I need to explain myself. Well, a few years back, Mr. Vick began visiting clinics to get treated for a VD, while living in the every growing media limelight of pro sports, Michael thought it would be a good idea to disguise his identity by using an alias. But we now know, because of his interests with dog fighting, that Vick is not the sharpest tool in the shed, he chose "Ron Mexico." He was of course recognized and a media circus ensued. People attempted to buy customized Atlanta Falcon's jerseys with Vick's #7 and the name "Mexico" on the back. I didn't stumble across this fact until later, when over this summer I was reading his wikipedia page after the whole scandal broke about his involvement in dog fighting. So to pay tribute to one of the greatest aliases of all time I chose it for myself.
But what's interesting here, is the role that media played not only in regards to Michael Vick but also in my ability to learn about this incident. It was over the summer when I was reading espn.com by the hour to check up on baseball news along with listening to sports radio every morning while I drove a van delivering mail for the University, when the whole Vick case broke up. I heard about it from radio, learned about it from the internet and watched it on TV. I decided to check the ever changing hot bed of trivial knowledge, Wikipedia, to learn more about who exactly was Michael Vick. This is when I came across the prior incident and in realizing the ridiculousness of this all and began to really think about it.
The media plays several roles in this little story; it was Vick's attempting to avoid it that lead to it coming back and biting him in the end (no pun intended). It was also media that lead me to it and informed me about it. It may not be quite as important as perhaps news coming out of the Middle East but it is still news nonetheless. So tomorrow when you pick up a newspaper, read an online news source or happen to be flipping through the channels and you see Michael Vicks face pictured, think about the overall power of the media and how you can never actually hide from it. If there's news out there someone's bound to report it and others are probably going to learn about it.