Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sports Journalists
I think that people forget that the role of a sports journalist is the same as any journalist, to relay information to their audience. This information needs to be interesting, informational, understandable and most importantly correct. It's impossible for any journalist to be completely unbiased, but good reporting journalists find a way to give the facts with out their opinons. Columnists are a very different story and I think some people forget that columnists just give their opinion and its the public's job to be critical of that opinion. With that in mind, yes journalists do play a role in telling the public what and how to think, but the public certainly needs to be critical of everything, not just in sports, that is being sad. Also I do believe that sport journalists should be more aware about the issues that we are discussing in class. I am actually taking a class called sports reporting and writing and we have not mentioned anything about the topics that we discuss in class. In fact, it almost appears that race isn't even an issue in the field, when it clearly is. Similarly, sometimes I think sport journalists forget about their ethical obligations in the name of ratings, which is very unfortunate and can lead to the problems that we are seeing now with T.O. But I also believe that the media helps the sports industry more than it hurts it, by making it an industry. Without the media there would not be the market for sports that there is today.
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On the situation with T.O., I will say that those kind of controversies are usually a two-way street. I mean as far as Owens goes, you can't blame the media when you consider what this guy has done. Most of T.O.'s past controversies could have been eliminated had he just said the right things and not fed the media machine. This is a guy who on the record called out his former quarterback (Garcia) on being gay. I believe he said something along the lines of.."Like my grandma told me, If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by god it must be rat." I mean that's absolutely uncalled for.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time the media definitely utilizes the knowledge of certain guys' (like TO) histories and personalities to their advantage. After the Bills game last week, the press was really trying to dig for any slight resemblance of an upset TO that they could find. Nonetheless, some of the questions were still valid when you consider T.O.'s performance thus far and compare it to how he has performed previously in his career.
With issues like these, I find myself going back and forth constantly as far as "whose side I'm on." I think both parties really antagonize each other and rarely will you have a situation where solely the athlete or solely the press is responsible for some sort of controversy like this.