Do you think sportscasters play favorites between various sports? It seems to me football is put in a far more favorable light than other sports. If the recent spate of criminal incidents involving football players (Pacman Jones, Jeremy Stevens, etc.) had involved basketball players, I think we would have heard a lot about how this played into the NBA’s thug image. Furthermore, the fact that last year retired player Bill Romanowski was caught as a client in a steroid dealer got virtually no play while baseball players also involved were heavily covered. Another thing is that Nascar (which I actually don’t like) seems to get less coverage than golf, which has a smaller fan base. Do you think my observations are right, and if so why?
Oh gosh, of course.
All news has its biases, and sports news isn’t going to be any different. You’re right in that the U.S. media seems to give the NFL a free pass on little player scandals, like steroids; baseball gets ripped for the same things.
Local media also tends to have its own inherent biases.
I live in Toronto. Toronto has a major AM sports station, the Fan 590, which is essentially hockey 24/7. During the hockey strike - I swear I am not making this up - hours-long shows would be dedicated to discussing the fact that *nothing was happening in the world of hockey. *
Now, I’ll grant this is Canada and hockey is king, but hockey isn’t the ONLY sport, certainly is not on people’s minds so much in July, and you can see it just by looking at all the other media outlets. Papers and TV give hockey plenty of coverage but also cover Raptors, Blue Jays, Argonauts, the NFL, golf, tennis, and what have you. The Fan 590 seemed to have a weird obsession with hockey.
Why is that? Well, the truth is that a lot of the folks who work there are ex-hockey guys; indeed, one of the morning co-hosts used to be the Maple Leafs’ general manager. They talk about hockey because that’s what they know. It’s their comfort zone, they’re used to it and understand it, and so that’s what they prefer to present. They were, for a long time, averse to discussing basketball in any Toronto media outlets (the National Post, to its credit, jumped on the Raptors train earlier than most) because there simply was no base of basketball understanding in the Toronto sports media; they’d covered HOCKEY and baseball and football for eons, but had little background in basketball, being in a place where there not only had never been NBA hoops before but where there isn’t any NCAA hoops. They didn’t understand it so they covered it first as a novelty and then with only a grim, almost grudging sense of duty, at least until the market developed and attracted basketball media talent.
Sooner or later someone will come into the thread and say “Well that’s what the public wants” but of course there’s no reason to believe the media’s always right about what the public wants. If they were, there wouldn’t be so many cancelled TV shows.
If the media concentrate more on steroids/HGH in baseball than in football, I don’t think it’s because of bias.
Look, major league baseball players are MUCH bigger than they were in the Seventies, when I was a kid. Similarly, football players are MUCH bigger than they were in the Seventies. That’s partly because players make a lot more money now, and can work out/train all year round. But steroids and HGH have undoubtedly played a big role in the size increases in both sports.
The difference is this: when I was a kid, baseball fans looked at players and saw a lot of guys who didn’t look like real athletes at all. There were scrawny guys smoking cigarettes (like Mark Belanger). There were fat guys (Wilbur Wood). There were a lot of average Joes on the field. At most, teams would have one or two sluggers with big biceps. So, when a fan my age looks at a modern baseball team and sees second basemen with biceps and shortstops with six-packs, well… it stands out! It becomes very, VERY obvious that something has changed.
But football is different. Football players have ALWAYS been much bigger than their fans. Today, an average offensive lineman weighs 310 pounds, which is enormous. But even in the Seventies, an average offensive lineman weight 260 or so. Which means that, even before steroids, fans looked at football players as behemoths, not as average guys. There were NEVER any scrawny football stars. Bob Lilly and Alan Page were waaaay smaller than today’s defensive tackles, but they were NEVER regarded as average, let alone small. They looked pretty damn big to fans of the time.
In baseball, we saw little guys turn into big guys. In football, we saw huge guys turn into enormous guys. The former is a lot more readily apparent.
One other “answer” to the oft-posed question of why the NFL doesn’t catch as much flak as the NBA or the major leagues for the misbehavior of their players:
Ask a baseball fan to name the starting lineup of the Cardinals, the Red Sox or the Yankees, and I’ll wager he can do it. Heck, I can still name all the starters of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds or the 1981 Dodgers.
But ask even a serious football fan to name as many of the world champion Colts as he can, and he’ll struggle. “Peyton Manning, obviously. Marvin Harrison. Joseph Addai… Dwight Freeney… uh, Adam Vinatieri.” Then, he may think of a few more, at most.
Get the idea? We KNOW, or think we know, all the baseball players. We know, or THINK we know all the NBA players. But apart from a handful of stars, NFL Players are just big. interchangeable hunks of meat in jerseys to most fans. If a staring guard for the Colts got in trouble, most fans wouldn’t even recognize his name. That makes outrage harder to come by.
Similar to what others have answered, local sports broadcaster play to both their audience and to their own taste. In the NY area, we have two sports radio stations, the Fan and a local ESPN-radio.
The Fan puts baseball first, football a close second, B-Ball third and everything else further back. Tennis and Golf get as much airtime as the NHL and auto-racing almost nothing. This reflects the market. On a few of the shows, Horse Racing gets decent coverage as the broadcasters themselves love Horse Racing.
On ESPN, it varies by the Broadcaster, the lunchtime guy like B-Ball and Baseball, guess what gets the most coverage. The Drive-time guy is the Yankee Announcer, you can guess that baseball gets most of the coverage.
All the announcers except the ESPN lunchtime guy appear to be extra critical of the NBA players. I think it is telling that all the announcers are white males except the lunchtime ESPN guy. It shows a level of prejudice on all the local announcers.
Jim
There is a good article on speaking to the issues surrounding how the media and the public perceives the difference in steroids in football versus baseball on espn.com’s Page 2. I don’t agree with the author 100 percent but it makes some good points. I’m sorry I’m just a guest and don’t know how to link, but the article is called, “Why we look the other way”
by Chuck Klosterman and is on their main page right now.
Welcome to the dope.
The easiest way to create a link is just to copy it from the address bar and paste it in the SDMB edit Window:
The fancier way is to Write the Title or words you want to see, highlight them and then click the Hyperlink button on the little reply to thread tool bar and click ok for the text to be displayed screen and then paste the link and hit OK.
The toughest way is to code it manually.
[URL =Klosterman: Why we look the other way - ESPN Page 2]the Title or words you want to see
Lose the spaces before the equal sign. Preview and test.
Jim
I have watched football games where announcers badmouth soccer because it is such a “low scoring” game and then turn around and praise the wonderful action of a 14-7 game of American football.
Do they not realize, for all practical purposes 14-7 equals 2-1 if we didn’t randomly give greater weight to a score in the gridiron game.
You have actually heard NFL announcers do this or just college ones? I have never heard an NFL announcer badmouth Soccer as you described. I have been watching football since around 1972. I am sure it has happened and could happen, but I would say it is very rare for the NFL. I cannot comment on local college announcers, I would have no clue and if you are hearing this often, it does show a high level of ignorance.
Jim
I have to agree with the OP. I’m not someone who tends to see racism everywhere, but I suspect that basketball’s de-facto status as The Black Man’s Sport has a lot to do with its thuggish reputation. As for baseball, it’s true that the circumstantial evidence for widespread steroid use is overwhelming, but I’ve noticed that you hardly ever hear anything about substance abuse in any other sport.
Here in Detroit, however, hockey is king. The Red Wings get plenty of air time.
I know I heard it last season, and I watched virtually no college ball then, so it would almost have to be NFL announcers.
This is my opinion only, with no factual basis, but it seems to me that to the tv network sports shows the NFL can do no wrong, and that is because the NFL get big ratings and is broadcast on every network (or its cable affiliate, in the case of ABC/ESPN). None of the networks wants to risk pissing off the goose that lays the golden eggs, especially since they’re all in bed with that goose, to really mix metaphors. The NFL has shrewdly divvied up its broadcast rights so as to give each of the networks a stake in its success, which in turn makes the networks just a little more leary of taking on harsh questions surrounding the sport, be it steriods or the stadium shuffle the teams are so good at playing.
I think all the networks broadcast golf too, and that’s because the big wig network execs like golf, even though the ratings aren’t near the level of football’s.
That of course is that the starting lineup of baseball : football is 9: 22.
I partuclarly liked this bit:
I think you have a good point (other than the superbly mixed metaphore). ESPN ran one season of The Playmakers, (depicting drug use, homosexuality and spousal abuse), which did well with viewers but failed to bring it back for a second season under pressure from the NFL.
Well, in baseball, you have a roster of 25.
8 of those guys are everyday starters, so every fan knows them. 5 of them are starting pitchers, and every fan knows them. 2 of them are closers, and every fan knows them.
In short, at least 15 of 25 players (60%) on a baseball roster are VERY well known to the fans.
In football, maybe 6 of 48 (12.5%) are known to the fans. Most are big, nameless, facelss guys in jerseys and helmets.
Look, I know the names and the talents of most of the New York Giants (my favorite football team), but if Amani Toomer sat down next to me, I wouldn’tt have a clue who he was.
That’s the nature of football.
I admit that the helmets may limit the face time of the players.
But let’s not contend that the second closer for the Brewers is a household name. I can’t name a single player on that team right now.
This is my duplicate post. Wheeeeeee!
Hockey is king? Nah. This was a hockey city when the Wings were winning Stanley Cups, but this city is a baseball city. It was just so dormant for such a long time. I’ll settle with “equal”. There are a lot of junior hockey teams and such, but there are so many closet baseball fans out there.
Detroit is a helluva sports place to be in these days. The Pistons, Wings, and Tigers are all performing at a very high level.
I’d like to see the explosion of joy if/when the Lions decided to win something.
Golf may have a smaller fan base, but fans of golf tend to be much wealthier than fans of NASCAR. Demographics matter.