This article claims that sportswriting, over the last few years has shifted into an overwhelmingly liberal profession with very few openly conservative voices left. As someone who doesn’t follow sports but always had the impressions that sports was a very traditionally conservative hobby, the claims made in the article were pretty surprising.
Are the claims made in the article accurate and, if so, what does that mean for the conservative sports fan? How come there isn’t room for conservative sports writers to ply their trade to this underserved audience?
Sports reporting organizations tend to run more feel-good stories these days which probably pander a bit more towards liberal audiences than conservative ones, but those articles aren’t really sports reporting.
I’m a conservative baseball fan, and I miss Keith Olbermann’s baseball pieces, I think George Will can be pretty wrong-headed about the game, and I have no idea about Joe Buck’s political leanings (nor could I care less.)
I guess I could see politics coming into play concerning stories about players unions and salary caps. Maybe greedy owners trying to get taxpayers to pay for construction of (yet another) new stadium for a franchise.
Things have changed radically since I was a kid. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the typical sportswriter at most daily newspapers was “Oscar Madison”- a blue collar, beer swilling guy with largely conservative attitudes. Dick Young of the New York Daily News epitomized the breed.
But today? There are no more Dick Youngs. There aren’t even many apolitical sports commentators. Most sports writers are very liberal and are eager to insert their political opinions, even when they’re wholly irrelevant to a story.
I think, as the article makes mention, sportwriting is necessarily about explaining a game these days. It’s too easy for fans to go on the web or a sports app to see the score and a few stats (hits, yards, shots, time of possession, etc.) that can tell them what sort of game it was. So explaining what happened in a game isn’t all the important. Sportwriting is more about grander narratives, and generally those stores will touch on politics on some way or another.
It seems that, nowadays, if you have any sort of public voice, you have to be political in order to obtain readers/listeners/viewers.
One of the ESPN radio shows I listen to on my drive in the afternoons was basically saying how you need to be able to talk politics, and you have to “come out” as whatever political leaning you are because your job depends so heavily on ratings that you have to say whatever will get people to listen to you. Nowadays that’s bitching about Trump (and we all know how muchI just loooove that)
But goes beyond that too. Like what was mentioned above, you have to put context around the things that are happening, and 9 times out of 10 that thing will be gender or race.
So, yeah, sportswriting is absolutely political, but it’s not in a vacuum. You literally cannot have a public voice and NOT be. Which is sad and not right.
My own observation is that sports media is not overly political, but if a sports figure or sports media member is going to get political, it will usually be a liberal opinion. I don’t want my sports reporting to come with either political agenda, by the way.
How much may simply be a result of covering sports that are played primarily by minorities, and gaining some sort of respect for the situations they grew up in? I sort of doubt that it was the case back up through the 1960s when many sports were not minority dominated like they are today.
I mean, you can’t be a sportswriter and cover football, basketball or baseball and not gain some degree of respect for minorities and their situations.
There are no formerly conservative sportswriters who were transformed by their experiences covering black athletes. Most current sportswriters come from the same liberal journalism schools as the people covering politics and the arts.
Personally I think modern sportwriting is driven by two forces: the sportsmedia owners who don’t care what position their writers take as long as it makes them money (or at least doesn’t lose them money), and the sportswriters and presenters who want to make names for themselves by finding soapboxes to preach from.
ESPN’s treatment of Curt Schilling is an example of the former - Schilling eventually got canned from ESPN for his various anti-trans, anti-Muslim, anti-various-other-things postings on social media, but it’s noteworthy that when Schilling and colleague Keith Law had their little public spat over evolution vs creationism on Twitter it was pro-evolution Law who got suspended. When Law was seen as the troublemaker they clamped down on him, whereas when Schilling’s rhetoric became so toxic it began to damage the brand he got the chop. In neither case did ESPN care about the subject of the debate/controversy - all they wanted was for any disruption to Business As Usual to stop.
Conversely, sports has traditionally been a small-c conservative enterprise and a lot of the easy targets for soapboxing - racism, homophobia, etc - remain low-hanging fruit even after long periods of discussion about them. Add to that issues of doping and long-term damage to athletes (see the current issues with brain damage to football players (both kinds)) and it’s easy pickings for anyone wanting to make their name as a crusader. The sportswriter who sticks to the facts of the game and the occasional opinion on the questionable referee decision du jour will never earn a name for himself; as the strippers said to Gypsy Rose Lee, you gotta get a gimmick or you’ll never make it in this business.
I don’t read a lot of sports coverage, but maybe you provide a few examples of this. Aside from a columnist using a day’s slot to go off on political issues, can you show me a sports story with an obviously liberal opinion inserted?
Honestly, you must be reading different sports media than I am.
The great majority of sports reporting falls into three categories:
Stories that are absolutely ass-boring recitations of simple facts,
Essentially apolitical polemics about teams and players that, as often as not, are incredibly stupid (along the lines of “they should trade Jones!!!11!”) and
Puff pieces, like “Johnson is working really hard this spring!” or “Smith came back from family tragedy to earn a spot on the national team.”
There absolutely are some sportswriters who have the ability and the pedigree to get political. There aren’t many of them, though.
Of course, it can be the case that the subject is political, as with, say, Colin Kaepernick or Gregg Popovich. But the media can’t control what those men think or say.
I think this quote from Colin Cowherd (I know, I know, but he’s on to something here) really indicates why sportswriting isn’t the ‘let me tell you about the game’ that some people think it is:
Yes, I am. It’s based upon no statistical evidence whatsoever, that I saw. It’s a personal opinion, backed up by some limited testimony from certain writers (mostly Frank Deford, who’s always been a “liberal” writer for my money). It bases most of its conclusions, or at least attempts to support them, with reference to a few examples of situations that had a potential political bent; as we know, anecdotes are not substantial evidence of an overall pattern.
If the article’s basic assertion is that there tends to be a “liberal” bias in how potentially controversial subjects are treated in the sports media, then I’d not be shocked if studies proved this to be true. After all, the “media” in general (print media especially) tend to be more “liberal” as an aggregate. But the vast majority of sports reporting that I read is either factual recitation with added color, or blatant opinion regarding the merits of a particular player/coach/decision. As several have already noted, it’s pretty hard to be “political” about that.
About the only time politics seems to come into sportwriting is, as already noted, when there are civic issues, funding, or political jockeying over ownership or siting.
As in the continuing and justified rage over Hartford’s new downtown baseball stadium, about to miss the second opening day amid huge cost overruns and terrible quality issues, when we were promised, crossmyheart, that it would be built for $X million and open for the 2015 season. It was a purely political/patronage project and everyone could see that, but it got rammed through anyway, and ran into absolutely predictable trouble. So the local sportswriters have a thing or say to do about the political roots of that mismanagement, of course, and there are political slants to the writing.