Bias? Laziness? Front Page Seattle P-I Article Is Inexplicably One-Sided

Oh but do we have it in for the dailies today. The lead article in today's Seattle P-I describes the sorry state of our continent's vacated basketball arenas.

The Forum, Inglewood, Calif.: Now a worship hall for a Los Angeles church. Also a venue for concerts and family events.

Memorial Coliseum, Portland: The city's minor league hockey team still plays some, but not all, home games there. Also hosts community events and high school sports championships.

Boston Garden: Now a parking lot.

Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens: Empty for years before becoming a retail superstore.

This would seem to support the question-and-answer session that is the article's headline: "What happens to Key Arena if Sonics leave? Other facilities have become white elephants."

Looks like the P-I's already made up their minds, but what they don't tell you is this--all four of these arenas were replaced by competing arenas in the very same city! In some cases, only feet away! Not, as would be the case with any arena built to compete with the Key, on the other side of a lake.

In Houston, the former home of the NBA's Rockets was empty for awhile, and is now home to a large church congregation. But that's because the Rockets asked for, and got, a no-compete clause for concerts and other events in their new arena.

The P-I cites it as another example of a new arena making the old one redundant. But a quote from a Houston official suggests another, awesome, possibility.

"The sports teams want the new arena, but they want to make money off the thing. If you keep the old stadium and make it available at a lower rate, than you get all the rock concerts, and the new stadia lose business."

All the concerts? At a lower rate? So, we lose the Sonics and we get more concerts and cheaper ticket prices...that sounds pretty good.

For some reason, the P-I article doesn't point out how this nugget bodes well for a Sonics-less Key, though it seems pretty obvious to us. The Key could be transformed, perhaps with a minimal remodel, into a top-notch concert/lecture venue. Maybe.

One other example. And this is the first paragraph of the article:

Once the revered stomping grounds of basketball great Larry Bird, Boston Garden is now a parking lot for the gleaming new NBA arena that replaced it.

Well, yeah, because the "gleaming new NBA arena" was built right next door. Key Arena is hardly likely to become a parking lot for an arena in Bellevue.

We're absolutely mystified. It seems like the P-I started with a conclusion, then wrote an article around it, blinded to any evidence that their conclusion could be flawed. It has two writers so maybe it's a poorly done mashup of two different pieces?

Is the P-I planning a follow-up article? Or what?

WTF? P-I, are you out there?

Unless this is a part of a slow transition to turn the P-I into a biased, tabloid-style paper, something we fully endorse.