Page 63 - Sport Culture and the Media

44 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

sports pages are characterized by inaccuracy, incompetence, technical weakness
and ethical failings. This is not a reputation confined to print, as one indigenous
Australian journalist, who trained as a sports broadcaster before moving into
other areas of radio, remarked of the cool reaction of his new non-sports
colleagues to his career background: ‘I mean there is that stigma attached to
sport, that it’s not really news as such’ (William). What, then, are the prevailing
standards by which all journalism is assessed and which determine what counts
as ‘news as such’?
While there is considerable disagreement about the core criteria of good
journalism – we need only contrast the highly subjective ‘new journalism’
(Wolfe and Johnson 1975) with the canon of objective reportage – it is useful to
outline a conservative prescription for what journalistic values and practices
ought to be, and then to compare them with the failings – real or imagined – of
sports journalists. In a diatribe against journalism educators who subscribe to a
cultural studies approach, Windschuttle has outlined ‘the three characteristics
of journalism that most teaching in the field upholds’:
First, journalism is committed to reporting the truth about what occurs in
the world . . . Second, the principal ethical obligations of journalists are to
their readers, their listeners and their viewers . . . Third, journalists should
be committed to good writing.
(Windschuttle 1998: 11)
In another place I would take issue with Windschuttle’s rather crude and
mechanical journalistic manifesto, but it is probable that such prescriptions are
frequently taken by journalists and non-journalists as the yardstick of ‘good
journalism’. It is immediately apparent that much contemporary (and no doubt
previous) journalism of all kinds does not observe these strictures. ‘Truth’ can
be manipulated by governments or proprietors or ‘spin doctors’ and sundry
other media manipulators; the interests of readers may be sacrificed for those of
advertisers or journalistic careerists; what appears on the page may be a ragbag
of cliché and plagiarism (see, for example, the trenchant criticisms of con-
temporary journalism by crusading public intellectuals like John Pilger (1998)
and Noam Chomsky (1989; Herman and Chomsky 1988)). Yet, as we have seen,
if journalism in general is open to such charges, sports journalism, lowly placed
on the ‘totem pole’, is doubly so. In part, these criticisms are made by con-
necting what sports journalists do with who they are. Garrison and Salwen
(1994: 40–1) describe them as ‘overwhelmingly white, male, college-educated
and thirty-something’. For most journalistic disciplines, the bulk of this
description would hold except for the ‘overwhelming’. As Henningham (1995:
14), for example, notes of the sexual composition of the profession in Australia,
there are almost nine male sports journalists for every one female, but among