Sports Journalism at its Worst: In Three Acts -- Vol. 2

Today’s sportswriters seem awfully important — to themselves, that is. I’ll wait for a journalist’s autobiography when I’m interested in learning about their personal life, but as for a column, I’d like an informed opinion on an interesting topic. Using one’s own experiences as the presentation of their subject matter is both tired and egotistical. The rock-star journalists, who apparently lead such interesting lives that they must inject us into their daily narrative, have three-hour talk shows on the radio where toothless first-time callers yet long-time listeners blabber on about their disgust for today’s greedy, flamboyant and self-serving athlete. These people are the most bored amongst men; the one’s stuck in traffic, or on long road-trips, but either way in their cars. While it’s shuddering to imagine that there are still yet a handful of these types who listen to and call these programs from their work, it’s worse to think of them doing so from home – and for fun at that. These people have a burning need to voice whatever sage and well thought-out piece of opinion they’ve laboriously hauled around with them since its conception. “Others must know. I must be heard!”

The online comments after the articles on various news web-sites are not dissimilar from the truckers calling in the radio shows. It’s a bit more refined (mostly), but the same bandwagon voice sings out from these ‘comments’ sections. The same grumpy, dissatisfied on-line character stalks these web-pages eager to defend the writer and to further vilify the column’s complaints – and they’re almost always complaints. In it’s purest nature, this is a liberty that shouldn’t be discouraged, ever. My complaint to their complaining is that such an easily appeased fan-base of an established columnist does not demand a broader variety of subjects and angles. Why write anything other than what the readers have demonstrated their agreement toward? Where I'm from, that's called job security.

But it’s the readers who disappoint me the most in the equation. They have power over the journalist, but they forget and walk the party line. They begin to look for the columnist to remove the responsibility of forming an opinion of their own — one less task in a busy American agenda. Soon, the power shifts into the wrong hands: the newspaper’s. Not overnight, yet not in an ice age, the same five or six columns, recycling the same opinions, satisfy the general readership; first locally, then nationally as the mighty octopus of the modern media mogul stretches out to the cosmos. The sensational and the speculative in sports are talked silly, while actual analysis and insight to events which transpire on the playing-field are lost to the scouts and quietly keen observers.

It’s time that you, the readers, take a stand on what has become the mighty cliche that is the sports-media empire. You must tell them you want something more, something you can sink your teeth into. Remind them that when an athlete does something newsworthy outside the hash-marks, that person becomes a public figure, not an athlete, and that its corresponding coverage should be found in the “Celebrity Watch” section and not in Sports. Has it not occurred to anyone in charge of these things that the magnified coverage of young, rich men acting out in public has inspired so many others, and even more yet to surface, to do the same?

Having branded myself a writer, I cannot join your side of that fight; I can only attempt to produce work which speaks for my priorities and interests.

This late-night ramble appears to have turned into a call-to-arms which was not my intention but has shown itself necessary to be written and hopefully discussed. I ask the gentle reader to be just that when noticing the loaded hypocrisy contained within these paragraphs. Until next time,

Mojokong — the battered and fried piece of worn delicacy.