Page 61 - Sport Culture and the Media

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by many journalists, then the discipline of sports journalism is believed never
to have been out of it. Salwen and Garrison note that this ‘historical baggage’
weighs down sports journalism and allows sporting figures like the late A.
Bartlett Giamatti, once president of Major League Baseball’s National League,
to state:
My impression is that editors generally ignore the sports section. They
ignore it in the sense, and it is an important one, that the same set of
editorial standards for accuracy, competence, distinguishing fact from
opinion, rewriting, and editing are simply not applied as consistently
or rigorously to sports sections as they are applied to all other sections of
the paper.
(Giamatti, quoted in Salwen and Garrison 1998: 89)
In finding sports journalists guilty of sins of truth denial, dubious ethics and
misplaced apostrophes, there is a suggestion – not uncommonly held within
and without the sports discipline – that sports journalists are a breed apart.
Indeed, this term was used by a provincial British sports journalist in describing
the special demands of the job:
I think the [sports] news is different, you are a different breed . . . it’s a
very specialist area, sports fans don’t suffer fools, you need to know what
you’re talking about. You can’t just put anybody on sport, you’ve got to
be certain he’s a fanatic . . . you have to live and breathe it to an extent,
you have a vast knowledge, especially like myself, a special editor of a
particular sport . . . because rugby in Barchester is the be-all-end-all, really
. . . If you’re giving statistical information you’ve got to be on the ball,
you’ve got to get it right, because you can guarantee if you don’t get it right
somebody will pick it up. It only has to happen a couple of times and you
get known as the person who gets it wrong, who can’t get it right. So you
have to live and breathe it, you have to be armed always with facts.
(Alan)
In sharp contrast to Giamatti’s notion of an indifferent tolerance of inaccuracy,
this sports journalist is acutely aware of the demanding nature of the reader-
ship, to the extent that the journalist is expected to display, on pain of getting
‘known as the person who gets it wrong’, the same fanatical attention to
sporting statistics and facts as the fans themselves. It is by meeting such
demands that sports journalists sometimes seem to become detached from the
wider profession and attached to the world of sports fandom (we could call this
‘anorak’ journalism).
As Henningham (1995: 13) points out, the almost uniquely isolated position
of sport in media organizations helps foster such feelings of professional