Page 71 - Sport Culture and the Media

52 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

following morning he says, ‘I’m not very happy with you’, and puts the
phone down, then the job is made that much more difficult.
D.R.: If there is a kind of embargo by the manager, and he refuses say to
speak to you, would that make it virtually impossible to do your job?
Gareth: Um, no. In fact two or three years ago I did have a set to with
Fred Wild, the previous manager. The team were doing badly and the
paper generally, not totally what I’d written, but I’d been criticizing, and
other writers on the paper as well on the sports desk were having their
two pence worth . . . As a result of that he said we were trying to get him
the sack and he had no intention of cooperating with us in future, so he
refused to speak to us, to the paper in general. That meant that for a
period we had to go along with, you know, we weren’t banned from the
club, there was no suggestion of that. It was just purely that I didn’t have
access to the manager to obtain the information on a daily basis, but I was
still able to go along, report the matches in the normal way, and pick up
information as best one can.
There are other contacts that a journalist has, naturally, he doesn’t rely
purely on the manager, although it is the manager that they normally deal
with on a day-to-day basis, quote on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t mean
that you don’t get unidentified sources and, therefore, you can’t quote
people anymore, and you’re having to say ‘this is believed to be happening’
and ‘that may be happening’. In some ways it takes the pressure off a little
bit right away, you no longer have the worry, as I mentioned earlier, of
having to get back onto the manager the following morning and take flak
for the criticism you might have given him overnight, because, you know,
you’ve no longer got that worry of having to speak to him. Basically, you
can sit back and let fly willy nilly. He’s got to, the manager’s got to suffer
in a way, because you’re going to feel even more free to criticize.
D.R.: And, of course, he did in the end get the sack.
Gareth: That was about twelve months later.

This exchange reveals the complexity (familiar, of course, to journalists on
many other rounds where the ‘object’ to be reported on and the associated
sources are fixed and limited) of the relationship between the sports journalist
and their principal source. It is a relationship of mutual dependency – the
sports entity needs media coverage and the media worker needs a story – which
can break down or get out of balance. In this instance, ‘normal service’ was
resumed without compromising journalistic integrity (indeed, the journalist
felt liberated by not having to deal with the source on a ‘daily basis’, so being
licensed to ‘let fly willy nilly’), but it is not difficult to imagine less ethical
outcomes (arising out of, as Murphy (1976) discovered in his study of provincial