While channel surfing during the commercials on the 5 PM news, I tuned into an alleged town hall meeting on Fox Sports Northwest, featuring new Sonics owner Clay Bennett, Kevin Calabro (the longtime voice of the Sonics), and an audience that was obviously hand-picked to lob easy questions that had been scripted in advance.

It seemed like something out of The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss, the classic story of Nixon's staged public meetings that were a cynical counterfeit of what was supposed to be a politician being accountable to the public, but was really Tricky Dickie doing dirty tricks with illusions of public accountability. The FSN performance was obviously staged, on the television channel that broadcasts Sonics games, and that's a good example of the extent of public accountability of professional sports in America.

I didn't watch the entire performance, but what I saw involved a lot of easy questions like "If Seattle builds you an arena, will you stay here always?" and "Will you try to win?" Because it was so obviously staged, it's unlikely that I missed Clay Bennett's responses to any of the following questions:

What proportions of Sonics revenue (averaged over recent years) has come from a) live attendance, b) local media, and c) national media?

Are the Sonics going to pay their share of the tens of millions of dollars that are still owed for renovations to Key Arena at the Sonics insistence, and what reason is there to trust the Sonics and NBA not to have yet another arena upgrade scam in another dozen years?

Why should anyone trust the NBA to be anything other than a collusion of greedhead tax-evaders and grafters who operate a partnership to maximize their mutual profits?

If the NBA has most of its revenue from some combination of tax breaks and national media that favors championships in major markets, might that explain the similarity of the history of the Sonics with other lesser markets where championships are not welcome very often (which may be why there have been so few NBA Finals involving Indianapolis and Sacramento)?

The Sonics' previous owners operated the teams with announced losses that allowed tax write-offs on other investments, then sold the team for huge capital gains. How might other taxpayers get cheated in such a transaction, and what would you suggest happen to make sales of professional sports franchises become less of a ripoff?

Would other NBA owners approve a franchise move away from Seattle's market to Oklahoma City? Regardless of any possible arena deal and its effect on live attendance, wouldn't the team and the NBA lose many times that much in media revenue by moving to Oklahoma City? Do you really, really believe the rest of the NBA owners are so dumb they'd want to trade the Seattle market for the Oklahoma market based on the economic impact of live attendance (or the nuances of luxury boxes or expanded seating capacity)? Are they so stupid as to believe that their revenue opportunities from luxury seating would be better in Oklahoma City (where there are far fewer really rich people than in Seattle) with an arena that's newer than Key Arena?

Mr. Bennett, if the Seattle area refuses your implied blackmail about moving the Sonics (as if arena capacity really mattered), would you move the Storm too (given how well the Storm does for live attendance in a WNBA with far less mass media revenue)?

According to Sports Illustrated, one of the major demographics of WNBA attendance is the presence of an active lesbian community. In a multi-state radius of a few hundred miles from Oklahoma City, how many lesbians have you got? Enough to fill up an arena? How often?

If you want to threaten to move the Sonics to a better arena deal in Oklahoma City, why should anyone in Seattle be so stupid as to not call your bluff and let you see if NBA owners are willing to trade the Seattle market for the Oklahoma City market?

Why shouldn't Seattle sports fans and tax-payers be pissed off at politicians like Margarita Prentice and Christine Gregoire, who seem to have that traditional political favoritism for interests who pour concrete (and other stadium scam activities) at public expense? Given all the expensive public spending priorities (transportation infrastructure, environmental protection, etc.), would any politician suggest yet another arena at public expense without a lot of political pressure from interests associated with stadium scams? Aren't the politicians involved in an arena scam for the Sonics inviting targets for citizen outrage?

To what extent are the Sonics an elitist form of public entertainment that's a bad television show for most fans, and attended too often by fans who are corporate royalty who get too many tax breaks to entertain one another?

Wouldn't it be preferable to use funds proposed for a new arena for the Sonics to promote amateur and participatory sports?

My hope is that this article in Eat These Sports! might inspire folks in Seattle's independent media to make Clay Bennett and the Sonics more publicly accountable than they were in the staged town hall show on FSN. Something like Michael Moore used to do on The Awful Truth would be fun, but I'd like to extend it to passing these questions on to mainstream media (and fans) so that Clay Bennett (and Sonics representatives, including their favorite politicians) no longer have many media opportunities where at least some of these questions don't get asked.