The Unfortunate Changes to Sports Journalism

In my last blog I wrote about the over-blown reporting on the deflated footballs in the recent AFC Championship Game. My point in writing it was to accent the blurred line between news stations advertising and news stations reporting the news. Some would argue that the football scandal isn’t important news, but what I found interesting was how sports news is reported today and how it has evolved over time.

Sports writing seems to be a lost art. Today we see sports news that is over-simplified, written to provoke reactions in readers and viewers, when there was a time when sportswriting involved thought-p-provoking analysis and apt comparisons of sports to other aspects of culture. One of the finest examples of this art was the work of the master sports writer, A.J Liebling, a writer for the New Yorker magazine in the 40s and 50s who specialized in boxing. In a recent piece about Liebling’s work called, "What Boxing Writing Can Teach Us About Everything: A.J.Liebling on Moore-Marciano," Carlo Rotella detailed the journalist's work on one specific fight. In the article Rotella praises Liebling’s ability to reach the lower and upper classes, and his ability not to just recount the fight in detail but to provoke thought about the nation and the athletes while doing so.  To Rotella, "contrasting the variety of ways of seeing becomes the point of [Liebling’s] piece, dramatizing the process of making sense of what would appear to most readers as opaquely chaotic violence."  Who would use such language to describe even the most ambitious stories reported on Sportscenter today?

 

A.J. Liebling

While the purpose of Liebling’s writing is to make the reader see boxing as more than a fist fight, even as a metaphor for American life, modern sports reporters are not critics, nor are they artists; the aim of sports journalism today is to provoke a reaction or to boost viewership. Rather than "contrast a variety of ways of seeing" reporters present a one-sided view of an issue and repeat it over and over again. Rather than focus on strategy in football, reporters try to bring out the violent nature of the sport to promote their networks and raise Nielson Ratings. Rather than focus on the sport itself, sports news has abandoned stories about sports for sports as scandal. Athletes are no longer sportsmen; people care more about what they do off the field than on it. Cheating scandals, domestic violence and how much money the coaches and players make have become top stories, replacing the actual game. Months were spent on the Ray Rice issue, on stations like ESPN and magazines like Sports Illustrated rather than on the game of football; more focus is put on mistakes athletes make than on their plays.

Above all, sports news has also been over-simplified. Rotella cites an article Liebling wrote characteristically entitled "Ahab versus Nemesis." Just the title is a literary reference to Moby Dick, but Rotella finds references to culture beyond the title in the article itself, which contains analogies to Euclidian geometry, opera, and Aristotle's Poetics. Liebling had a skill to bring critical analysis to the world of sports; rather than focusing on deflated footballs or a man unjustly beating his wife, he wrote about the beautiful style of one boxer being beaten by a thug; then asked the bigger question, what does that mean about our values?

I suggest you read Rotella's piece and even Liebling's writing, so you can read more into the sports you watch.