For a week, the issue of safety in Dodger Stadium, and lack of same, was mostly a local or state topic, albeit an intense one.

Some baseball fans outside Southern California and the Bay Area may have tumbled to the fact that a Giants fan remains in intensive care with brain injuries suffered during an assault by two Dodgers fans.

But it was not a national story, never mind a global one.

That changed, however, when the New York Times published a story on the topic.

NYT is the eminence gris of journalism, and not just in the U.S.  It is by far the most important newspaper in the world; some British newspapers might consider themselves in the running, and the Wall Street Journal  may, as well, but it is to the New York Times that world leaders look day after day to get a sense of U.S. opinion. Here in the UAE, if a story is in NYT, local leaders assume that is how everyone in the U.S. feels, from the government to the man in the street. For good or ill, that is the stature of NYT.

Thus, bad behavior among Dodgers fans is known all over the world now. Which perhaps is proper, considering how serious the issue is and how ineptly the Dodgers handled it, from the basics of not having adequate security around the stadium to Frank McCourt’s callous and disconnected remarks and sluggish reaction.

The Times story is fairly mild. It does not contain many of the more specific examples of bad behavior in the stadium, nor does it suggest Dodger Stadium is particularly dangerous in the context of American sports.

But the point is … when your bad news appears in the New York Times, the story has, officially, blown up.

That, then, may explain why Los Angeles civic leaders, including the mayor and chief of police, now are deep into damage control, attempting to limit the negative fallout that now surrounds Dodger Stadium, and they are doing so by insisting on solutions to the basic problems that led to the near-fatal attack on Opening Day.

Once the Times has written about an issue, it becomes attached to its city of origin. Thus, “thuggish fans … Los Angeles … baseball team named Dodgers.”

The genie is out of the bottle. Frank McCourt’s incompetence now has blackened the reputation of all of Los Angeles.