One Mind, Two Sports Editors: Should We Care About This Stuff? (tag: Sports))
Thanks a lot, MIchael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated. Thanks to you, the two sports fans that live in my head are back at their bickering again. I thought I had them safely retired. But then they read your piece today about the three Big Stories That Probably Shouldn't Be On The Sports Pages. Now I can't shut them up. Your comments about the news media coverage of Tiger Woods' scandalous sexual conduct and his behavior at and after the Masters this week, Ben Roethlisberger's legal problems concerning his sexual conduct, and Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones inebriation-induced mouthing off to some fans were right on. Or completely out of line. We're still debating. On the one hand, I've long thought that the way media treats sports celebrities in particular was just out of whack. If a guy who is CEO of a bank gets caught in flagrante delicto with a woman not his wife, the story doesn't show up on the Business Page. It's either on the front page, in general news, or not at all. Similarly, a doctor who embezzles funds from Medicare doesn't have the news splashed on the Health page, but in the news section. But an athlete who does anything even vaguely "wrong" and you can bet the sports pages will be the primary, if not only, place you're likely to find out. That seems wrong on a couple of levels. First, it assumes that nobody who doesn't read the sports section cares about stuff athletes do. That's demonstrably not the case in my own house. Second, it assumes sports fans will want to read about the alleged misconduct. That is also demonstrably wrong in my own house. Except for the Other Guy in my head, who thinks the preceding paragraph is pure unadulterated BS.He says that these people (mostly men but there was that ice skating scandal a few years back) are legit sports news by virtue of their fame in that field. He thinks that not only is it true that "real sports fans" care about that stuff, but that only someone who follows sports would both want to know about it and appreciate its potential impact on a team or a sport or, in the case of Woods, an entire industry. Or several entire industries, apparently. So there are really two questions here. First, is celebrity a reason to make people fair game for news coverage of literally everything they do? Second, is it right to put news about an athlete engaging in unrelated activity that is immoral or illegal in someone's eyes, on the sports page or does it belong in the general news area? This second point is more important than it appears because if you decide this news belongs in the general news area, you make the editors who choose what to cover evaluate the story in the context of everything else going on in the world that day. In that context, most of this stuff is junk. But if you say, "This is a sports story. How important is it compared to all the other real sports stories we have to cover today?" then you make it orders of magnitude more important just by the narrower comparison. I feel right about that. So, listen up, Other Guy. Shut up. Go back to sleep. Who asked ya?
