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.

News and Advertising, Whats the difference?

The variety and actual substance of news leading up to this years superbowl has really deflated. News of a "controversy" has taken over not just sports news over the past week, but has also taken time away from other current events. In the AFC Title game, Patriots versus Colts, it was discovered that footballs used by the Patriots (allegedly only in the first half) were deflated under the NFL requirments. The issue is not very interesting at face value, but the news coverage of the story seems to say differently.

Rather than talk about the football itself, news and sports sources have focused on this scandal. NBC news, the network showing the superbowl this year, is one of the worst offenders of what amounts to a self reflexive new reporting. It would seem that they are not covering the story to inform people or to help viewers form an opinion (the purpose of press in a democratic society), it actually seems that the network is covering the story to call attention to the game that will be shown on the network this Sunday. Rather than news,  a lot of air time is being allotted to promoting the Superbowl. This begs the question, what is news and what is pure advertisment? Is there any difference in this case? The model that television news uses is stories and content for a period then advetisments and then another cycle of news. Is there not enough ad time on TV already, should some limit be put on the amount that networks can advertise versus inform and still call themselves press?

What Should Treason Entail

There was recently threat of an attack on the capital building. Christopher Lee Cornell is a Cincinnati resident that called the plan "ISIS inspired." He planned to set off an explosive in the Capital Building and shoot politicians in the chaos.

There is no question this intent to kill American leaders and attack the capital deserves major punishment the challenge however is what can he be convicted with. Since Cornell never got to take action and had no co-conspirators that based on the evidence there isn't really a sentence severe enough that can be given to him. Treason requires action so Cornell can't be tried for it. Shouldn't Treason cover more ground, how could intending to kill many people not count as treason especially when it's an attack on the capital.

The Benefits of Costco

Over Thanksgiving I wrote a post about a food drive Walmart was holding for its own employees. This is attested to Walmart's low wages for its workers in order to get low prices for their customers. The question I asked was would America sacrifice the low prices of Walmart for better worker treatment. Recently I decided to check executive compensation for Walmart and some competitors. One of Walmart's biggest rivals is Costco and comparing the executive spending was somewhat telling. Turns out rather than sacrifice the lower ranked employees, the executives seem to be making much less.

Walmart's executive compensation is 77 million dollars while as Costco's is 21 million. The 56 million dollar difference is one factor in the differences between working conditions lower on the totem pole. Costco offers health insurance for its employees while Walmart is notorious for avoiding the extra cost of health benefits by restricting employees hours. I'll revise what I said before, Walmart doesn't need to raise it's prices to improve treatment of workers, the company just needs to shift priorities from the white collar executives to the blue collar workers that keep the company alive.

I am Charlie

On January 7th there was an attack on a french satirical newspaper centered in Paris called Charlie Hebdo. The newspaper is famous for its satire of major political and religious leaders around the world, but some extremists didn't take some of these jibes lightly. The paper has a history of violent retaliation to their publications (a history seen in detail here) however the most recent attack on the paper has been the worst.

January 7th 12 people at Charlie Hebdo's offices were killed including 2 police officers and an editor, likely in response to this cartoon-

The man in white is saying, "I am the prophet Mohammed and the Man in black (supposedly a member of the Islamic State Group) is beheading him and saying "Shut up infidel." The cartoon is touching on the fact that the so called "Islamic State" is hurting the image of the islamic religion internationally by taking that name but not representing the majority of Muslims around the world. The cartoon is not propaganda. If anything it is making an effort to defend Muslims not represented by ISIS's radical views. An editor for Charlie Hebdo, Gerard Biard said in response to the attack, "I don't understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war." Contrary to its evident intention to attack Western ideology, this act of terrorism is an attack on freedom of press internationally. In the attack on Charlie Hebdo in one of the worlds most major cities, terrorists are threatening the press internationally. This attack parallels the decapitation of journalists in September of 2014, also by IS. Even if, like this cartoon, the argument is in favor of the non-violent and the majority, the press is now afraid to slight the Islamic State. The world has to treat this threat as it did before, not with fear but with strenth.