Page 60 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 41

demands imposed by the object to which those professional practices and ethics
are directed. In principle, then, sports journalists are no different from those
with any other assigned ‘round’ or ‘beat’. Court reporters relate the events of
important trials; law reporters address difficult legal issues; police reporters go
to crime scenes and get unattributable briefings from the constabulary; business
reporters watch the share market and pick up on the rumours (often planted)
of corporate plays; and sports reporters get the best seats at the biggest games,
inform others of what happened, and are meant to use this privileged vantage
point to expose the hidden workings of the sports machine. This ‘democracy’
of journalistic disciplines does not, however, exist in pure form. A hierarchy of
esteem (if not always one of salaries or profile) exists that places the ‘serious’
disciplines (like the politics round) at the top end and the ‘lighter’ ones (like the
entertainment page) at the bottom. Sports journalists, whose subject suffers
from the twin disadvantages of popular appeal and a focus on the body rather
than the mind, tend to gravitate towards the lower echelons. As Salwen and
Garrison discovered in their survey of over 200 members of the US Associated
Press Sports Editors:
Issues related to professionalism, which included ethics, were major con-
cerns to both sports journalism and journalism in general, according to
the respondents. Sports journalists who elaborated on these concerns as
they relate to sports journalism believed that their shabby reputations
cultivated over the years haunt them in this age of professional prestige and
accountability. In this regard, we can see how the historical roots of sports
journalism affect the field today.
(Salwen and Garrison 1998: 98)
Two levels of response to the researchers’ questions can be seen to be at work
here. When asked to consider journalism in general, 30 per cent of Salwen and
Garrison’s respondents ranked ‘professionalism’ second only to the ‘reader
related’ category (31 per cent) of the nine most important problem areas
(Salwen and Garrison 1998: 93). These sports journalists appear to be reflecting
on the overall decline of journalism’s occupational prestige, a fate that it
shares with other professions like medicine and law (Macdonald 1995).
When addressing sports journalism in particular, respondents ranked ‘profes-
sionalism’ first in the list of problem areas, although only 21 per cent of them
did so (Salwen and Garrison 1998: 93). The probable explanation of this survey
outcome is that the sports journalists saw their own discipline as so beleaguered
that they spread the range of important problems rather more widely, with
seven of the nine most important problem categories selected by 8 per cent
or above of the total, compared with only four out of nine for journalism in
general. Thus, if the profession of journalism is felt to be currently ‘in trouble’