Page 70 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 51

Crusaders and cheerleaders

The engaged, ‘crusading’ media role is less appealing to those sports journalists
(the majority, it seems) schooled in the work of describing sports events and
passing on news about them, rather than interrogating and probing their sub-
ject with vigour. Henningham found that the Australian sports journalists in
his sample are more ethically principled than other journalists on issues like
‘using confidential business or government documents without authorization’
or ‘badgering unwilling informants to get a story’. Ethics is, of course, a
highly contested area, and in the case of investigative journalism it might be
claimed that a higher ethical duty is being observed when such tactics are used
in the public interest. This ethical dilemma seems not to trouble many sports
journalists, who may be less tempted to cut corners in the interests of the ‘big
scoop’ not only because much of their work involves interpreting what is
already publicly known and visible, but also because they are heavily dependent
on cultivating good relationships with sportspeople, officials, sponsors, and
so on. The penalties of being frozen out by the ‘usual suspects’ (the pro-
viders of off-the-record insider information) are serious for journalists on any
round (Chibnall 1977) but are likely to be worse than most in sport, especially
outside the capital cities or where the journalist has been overly reliant on
sporting camaraderie and has not developed other analytical resources and
‘quotable’ sources. A provincial British print journalist whose main work task
was to cover the local soccer team made clear the professional and ethical
difficulties that may arise (what he called ‘the big tightrope of doing the job’)
when there is a high level of dependency and concentration on a single sports
operation:

Gareth: If you are working for a national paper, for example, or even a
paper covering a number of teams, you don’t have the daily contact and
you float in and out as it were. You may upset people at a particular club
but that doesn’t really matter because you’re not going back for a few more
weeks. But in this instance you have hit the nail on the head, my job does
entail speaking to the manager, the Baddington manager Brian Snout,
and my job is to speak to him basically every working day. But, yeah,
that’s right there can be occasion, OK you ring up in the morning and the
manager, whoever it may be over the years, is not very happy about what
you wrote last night and then you kick off with having to defend what
you’ve written before you move onto, you know, what’s happening today
type of thing. It is important, of course, that you do manage to bridge that
gap because at the end of the day you depend on ringing the manager to
get the information, so if you criticize them a bit too heavily and, the