MEDIA WATCH: SPORTS JOURNALISM ON LIFE SUPPORT?

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

The news media has not graced itself the past decade. The news business has moved out of the ivory tower, straight into the gutter. Rumor is reported as truth without even basic fact-checking and confirmation from more than one source.

Sports journalism has not graced itself, either, especially when it pilloried Michael Irvin on a false rape charge several years back, or sensationalizes rookie players and participants in sports ranging from golf to basketball.

All of this is done in an atmosphere where more and more sports entities are linked one to another. Fox Sports.com, for example, is part of a major media empire linking TV Guide, Fox Sports Net, the FOX network, and several major metropolitan newspapers. As such, Fox Sports.com can afford to ditch the opinions of its knowledgable web-based beat writers and publish the screed of FOX Television's talking heads.

The Disney empire is also a media synergist. Disney can kill an ABC News 20/20 story about abuses at Disney theme parks, all the while moving the Monday Night Football pre-game show to ESPN Zone in Baltimore, filling it with commercials for Disney videos, upcoming entertainment programs, and for National Car Rental, the official car rental agency of Disney World (and, of course, the new Disney Animal Kingdom).

While all of this is going on, what has happened to honest-to-goodness, gumshoe sports journalism?

These days, sports reporting in all of its forms -- television, radio, print -- have each developed the same basic formula as more and more news outlets are owned by fewer people (Disney, Newhouse, Turner-Time-Warner, Ruppert Murdoch and the like).

No matter where you are in America, your local TV sports report is likely a series of video highlights only about four minutes long, focusing on the moneyed sports, especially football. Video cameras at every practice, every press conference, every arrival in a town -- "And here are the Chiefs arriving at LaGuardia tonight for tomorrow's game, exclusively on Channel 5."

Every other sport on the docket, especially from Labor Day to New Year's Day, gets short shrift. The only exception is the World Series or extraordinary events like the home-run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.

One example of how saturation coverage of one sport can freeze out other sports occurred in Philadelphia in 1997 and 1998. It was disheartening to watch the way sports media, in what is probably the United States' premier amateur basketball city, treated the American Basketball League's Philadelphia Rage. Few highlights and no features were aired on the local news, and the scores of Rage games were tossed off in a "By the way ..." mode.

When you watch Sunday sports television shows from 11:30 p.m. to midnight, the contents are literally identical. The host(s) voice over extended highlights of the National Football League game of the week, talk for a few minutes with a team member, go through the highlights of every other game, talk for a few minutes with a radio talk show host/football pundit, then kill time showing highlights of the rest of the weekend sports action.

One time, while watching two competing shows in Philadelphia, you could not help but notice that the formats and contents were virtually identical, highlight for highlight, interview question for interview question. It was as though the same script was mailed to both television stations!

It is not only local television which has suffered from a lack of imagination, but the national cable shows: ESPN SportsCenter, FOX Sports News, and CNN/SI Sports Tonight. Hodgepodges of taped features, highlights, the occasional guest analyst and the most pernicious network timekiller, the "video notebook."

ESPN is the largest user of this device, where weekly notes from college football, the NFL, and other big-time sports tends to relegate minor sports and women's sports to a 10-second slot near the end of their broascasts.

Video notebooks often tend to take on lives of their own: over an 18-hour period, we saw the same four-minute NFL notes piece repeated at least five times on ESPNews, two versions of SportsCenter (not including the 7 a.m.-1 p.m. repeating show which is taped the previous evening at 2 a.m.), on ESPN2's NFL 2 Night, and Monday Night Countdown!

And when the cable sportshows take on a big event, like Michael Jordan's retirement, the wall-to-wall coverage on both Fox and ESPN took on the same formula: interview as many talking heads as you can, show Jordan's last shot in the 1998 Finals, his swooping layup against the Lakers in 1990, the dunk over Patrick Ewing after beating two other Knicks along the baseline, and his last-second shot over Craig Ehlo to beat Cleveland in the playoffs in the late 1980s, beginning his legend in his search for "The Moment."

The day of Jordan's retirement, all three ESPN networks covered his news conference. This act went completely against the concept of having three allegedly distinct sports networks -- that concept being viewer choice. Choice, unfortunately, has been pitifully lacking in video journalism.

Print journalism has also gotten to a stale kind of "formula" coverage. Doing the job of newspaper can take on several forms, but today's classic mode is the one where "minutiae" is the word of the day.

Minor personnel moves, a baseball player changing batting glove manufacturers, policies on the eating of hot dogs on a football sideline can turn into media-induced controversies.

Some journalists in major metropolitan areas have turned the art of minutiae into something falling short of true sports journalism, having to report day-to-day happenings without any sense of perspective.

Weekly journals were supposed to take up the slack. For years, Sports Illustrated was the authority in terms of good sports journalism. Features in the back half of the magazine are the stuff which set the standard in writing about sport.

But, a year ago, ESPN Magazine, a large, glossy, glitzy publication with in-your-face pictures and hard-to-read graphics, started publishing. Its focus has thus far been on the major sports, with the same kind of ESPN-esque saturation coverage which has tended to freeze out women's athletic struggles and accomplishments.

Sports Illustrated blinked.

SI had been a magazine of record, one which thought enough of minor sports -- like the NCAA Final Fours in men's ice hockey, men's lacrosse, and the Division II, III, and I-AA championship games -- to give them annual stories.

These days, however, the only coverage of these events is in the "Leading Off" sections, with a large full-bleed photograph, with a caption which includes the score. For the 1998 men's lacrosse championship, this means that the real story of the Princeton championship effort -- the coming-together of a defense after star longstick Christian Cook suffered a torn knee ligament in the semifinals -- was never told.

Other sports publications have suffered. Sport magazine now encapsulates the content of Inside Sports, which went under.

And whatever happened to that women's sports publication boom of 1996? Sports Illustrated Women/Sport lasted exactly three issues before it was retired. This, despite its complete coverage of collegiate women's athletics, and excellent features of Sports Illustrated quality.

The people at Turner-Time-Warner have figured out that quarterly issues of women's sports do not sell, but apparently, turning the swimsuit issue into a "quarterly" -- that is, it does not fit into the weekly run of issues like it did until 1997 -- makes it an even bigger seller than ever.

SI also has printed numerous "commemorative" issues for championship or near-championship teams. It printed a Penn State issue that year the football team finished No. 2 in the country, as well as a No. 1 issue for Nebraska. It made issues for the Chicago Bulls, Denver Broncos, New York Yankees, and a NASCAR retrospective over the past year.

But putting this kind of effort into a women's sports publication? It will be interesting to see whether a relaunch -- as "SI For Women" -- will be given a better chance.

Another major comglomerate -- the Newhouse publishing empire -- launched Conde Nast Sports for Women at about the same time SI Women/Sport was rolled out. But less than a year later, that name was off the shelves, replaced by the bought name Women's Sports & Fitness from another entity.

The content of the new Women's Sports & fitness has slipped in terms of sports journalism. Open a copy and you will find ways to rehydrate yourself after a workout, the proper way to stretch, and a celebrity column or two. The "fitness" aspect of the publication has overtaken the mission and content of the original Conde Nast publication. Oh, sure, there are profiles of athletes in the magazine, but they are mostly extreme athletes like rock climbers and "aggro" in-line skaters.

So, where do we go from here, as sports journalism goes? Some of the best sports journalism is now actually found in the electronic media, rather than print. Shows like National Public Radio's "Only A Game," Fox Sports Net's "Goin' Deep," HBO's "Real Sports," and the occasional ESPN special "Outside the Lines" offer in-depth montages on subjects which daily media have little inclination of tackling.

College sports gambling, gays in sports, the only woman chief engineer on a CART FedEx Championship racing team, the struggle of CBA prospects, the sports card and memorabilia craze, and a year in the life of a first-year football team at a Division III Roman Catholic School have all been well-told through audio and video in ways which have equalled, and sometimes, surpassed, the journalistic risks taken in print over the years.

Sometimes, to find good sports journalism, you have to go slightly out of the mainstream. The story which could be the most important of 1999 -- the bribery scandal which has enveloped the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee and the International Olympic Committee -- was not broken by a company owned as part of a conglomerate.

The scoop intead went to non-profit National Public Radio, which at one time was doing daily updates from Salt Lake City while the moneyed media of Westinghouse, NewsCorp, Disney, Newhouse, Gannett, and General Electric have not been doing their homework.

Instead, as the SLOOC scandal deepened with allegations of the hiring of sexual favors in addition to the previously reported stories about medical care, weapons, and college scholarships, the mainstream sports media and news media in general have focused on other things: either "all Monica, all the time," or "all Michael, all the time."


What do you think? Email us at topofthecircle@aol.com, and we'll try to print a random sampling of your opinions, as long as you are willing to give us your name and where you are from. 1