Objectivity in sports journalism
The history and the research into journalism's most important professional norm.
The greatest sports columnist in American history earned a reprimand from his editor.
It was the early 1950s in New York City, and Red Smith was writing for the New York Herald-Tribune.
Like many in the New York media at the time, Smith had written scores of journalistic love poems about Joe DiMaggio. Smith had also gotten to know DiMaggio at Toot’s Shors, the legendary Manhattan bar/restaurant that was the epicenter of writing, sports, and entertainment in 1940s and 1950s New York.
Stanley Woodward was the longtime sports editor of the Herald-Tribune, and one of the editors who helped shape modern sports journalism. According to a story in Lee Congdon’s book on the golden age of sports writing, after DiMaggio retired in 1951:
(Woodward) told Smith that he was “not writing about deities. Stop godding up the athletes.”
Congdon wrote that Smith took that advice to heart and remembered it for the rest of his career.
But the kind of coverage that earned Smith a rebuke was not uncommon at the time. Grantland Rice, one of the first great American newspaper sports columnists, belonged to what Congdon called the “Gee Whiz” school of sports writers, that held up athletes as paragons of American virtue.
That attitude seeped into daily sports writing. Before he became a columnist, Smith covered the Phillies for the now-defunct Philadelphia Record. From Ira Berkow’s biography of Smith:
The Philadelphia Record, like most newspapers, allowed the ball clubs to pick up their reporters’ traveling expenses, lodging, and food. The newspapers justified it by saying that they were doing the club a favor with free publicity. And among writers, there were always a certain amount of “homers,” men who were rarely critical of the team.
Men who were not, to use the parlance of our time, objective.
Objectivity in journalism developed during the emergence of a more professionalized press in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Objectivity and factual reporting became the professional norms, as journalism moved past the partisan politics that defined early newspapers, which were often mere mouthpieces for the publisher’s political opinion.1
In sports journalism, objectively emerged as a professional norm later in the 20th century. Arch Ward, the influential sports editor of the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, openly curried the favor of leagues and teams, expecting preferential access in return.2 By the middle decade, that attitude was starting to change. Woodward, the editor who called out Red Smith for “godding up the athletes,” was one of sports journalism’s most influential editors. So was Jack Mann, whose tenure as Newsday’s sports editor was brief but vital in turning sports journalism away from its homer, “gee whiz!” roots.3
In 1989, John Soloski published a study in Media, Culture and Society titled “News reporting and professionalism: Some constraints on the reporting of the news.” A look at the professional attitudes that underscore journalism, it is a foundational piece for those of us who study media sociology.
From Soloski (emphasis is mine):
For journalists in the United States, objectivity is the most important professional norm, and from it flows more specific aspects of news professionalism such as news judgement, the selection of sources and the structure of news beats. … Journalists must act in ways that allow them to report the news objectively.
Soloski identified two advantages that objectivity gives news organizations. The first is that it protects the organization’s integrity because sources, not journalists, are responsible for the accuracy of the facts provided to reporters.
The second advantage:
It helps to secure their monopoly position in the marketplace. If the news were to be reported in an overtly political or ideological manner, the market would be ripe for competition from news organizations that held opposing political or ideological points of view. By reporting the news objectively, reader loyalty to a newspaper is not a function of the ideology of that newspaper. It is rather based on the thoroughness of the news coverage, subscription costs, delivery services or some other tangible factor that a newspaper can control.
In my world, this idea revolves around the discussion about whether or not sports journalists can be fans or should appear to root for the success of the team’s they cover. It came to the forefront a few weeks ago, when Jeff Pearlman tweeted about how the media was covering Deion Sanders’ early success at Colorado.4 The idea is that being a fan makes you biased in favor of the team you are covering, and therefore means your coverage will not be objective.
I’m not particularly interested in litigating that specific question.
Mainly because sportswriters are never objective.
No journalist is ever objective.
Journalists don’t neutrally observe events and record what they see. They like to think they do. But news is a social construct, which means we report on things based on a set of criteria we call news values (things like timeliness, proximity, impact, etc.) that have been established by decades of professional practice and education.
Same holds true in sports journalism.
I’ve written about this a lot at the Sports Media Guy home page, so let’s use those to revisit this idea.
First off, I once told my then five-year-old niece that, while she was visiting, she could help me out by rooting for “fast games and talkative players.”
Sounds objective right?
“Fast games.” That means I’m rooting for a certain type of game. A blowout, most likely. So that means I do not want a game with, say, a lot of pitching changes, or a match without a lot of deuce points, or extra innings or overtime. Even though that may be a better story, or a better experience for fans, I’m tacitly rooting against. it.
“Talkative players.” That means I’m rooting for a certain type of player to have a good enough game and be in a good enough mood to want to talk to a reporter after a game. I also want this player, or players, to say interesting things in interesting ways, instead of cliches. I want players to conform to my ideal rather than meeting them where they are.
Let’s broaden this out to the idea of “rooting for the story.” You hear this all the time when you talk to sports journalists. Heck, I made it the title of my dissertation about sports journalists.
It’s used as a central description of the job and also often as a defense when readers accuse reporters of rooting for — or more frequently against — a given team. In many ways, it’s a central, normative belief that encapsulates the sports journalists’ job. It distinguishes journalists as a professional field from sports fans. Fans live and die with their teams’ successes and failures, their wins and losses. Sports journalists don’t care who wins and loses. They have a job to do either way. They root for the best story — the most interesting, compelling account to them and to their readers.
Rooting for the best story sounds objective, but only when framed within the construct that journalistic objectivity is centered on team fandom. If you are rooting for a story, then you have a vested interest in the outcome — that it conforms to one of the pre-established socially constructed news values.
That is, by definition, not objective.
The larger point here is that it doesn’t matter.
Objectivity is not the goal. Fairness and accuracy are.
Digital and social media have thrown wrinkles in this, though.
Back in Red Smith’s day, newspapers were providing teams with free publicity. A symbiotic relationship between team and outlet has always been at the core of sports journalism.
But now, teams do not need the free publicity the newspapers give them. They have the means to connect with fans directly, through digital and social media. Which means fans have a choice in the type of coverage they get.
We like to think that fans want tough, honest coverage of their favorite teams. And sure, many do. But just as many want positive vibes only. If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan like me5, do you want to read about the flaws that were apparent in the team’s Monday night loss to the Jets? Or do you want to read a story about how the team will be fine the rest of the way?
OK, so the Bills are a bad example because did you see Josh Allen the other night? Let’s take Colorado.
If you’re a fan of that team, do you want to read stories questioning the potential long-term efficacy of Deion Sanders’ strategy? Do you want to read anything remotely critical right now? Or do you want to read about how things are incredible right now?
Fact is, there are a lot of fans who want positive news about their favorite teams. And we live in a world where news and media are increasingly funded not through ads but through subscriptions. Which means that media outlets have a financial incentive to be positive in their coverage, to attract the most readers.
That’s an interesting complication in this realm.
But again, objectivity is not the goal.
Fairness and accuracy are.
The Other 51
A couple of great recent episodes of The Other 51, my podcast about writing.
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Get It On The Page with Joe Posnanski
LISTEN HERE
In the introduction to this book, Joe writes that "This is the book I always hoped would be on the shelf” of his library when he was a kid. In this episode, he tells Brian why this would have been the perfect book for him when he was 10 years old.
Joe discusses how he had the title of the book before anything else, how he developed the book’s structure, and how he came up with the structures for all 108(ish) essays in the book.
Joe and Brian talk about how the book’s title is so simple but so powerful, and the importance of discipline in writing. As Joe asks himself, “Was this a good day or a not good day?”
Rabbit holes include our current Taylor Swift eras, Ozzie Smith YouTube, and the dump ballparks of our youth.
North Star with Sam Borden
LISTEN HERE
Sam has probably the best job title of anyone we’ve had as a guest on the podcast — Global Sports Correspondent for ESPN. Sam talks about how he got that job, how he built a successful career as a sports journalist despite not being a sports fan, and how he finds stories to write.
Sam and Brian also talk about what life is really like as a foreign correspondent. It’s not all Hemingway and lunches on the Seine. Sam talks about finding fixers who can help you report in foreign languages, and how he tracked down Darko Milicic at an apple orchard in Serbia.
Sam also talks about the biggest difference between interviewing for broadcast and interviewing for a print piece, how the concept of the North Star can help any journalist.
LISTEN HERE
See Michael Schudson’s essential book, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.
Bryant, J. & Holt, A. (2006). A historical overview of sports and media in the United States. In Raney, A. A., & Bryant, J. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of sports and media. New York: Routledge, 22-45.
See George Vecsey’s memoir, A Year in the Sun.
To his credit, Jeff turned that discussion into a nuanced and interesting examination of the role race plays in this story. You can read it at his excellent journalism newsletter.
UGGGGGGH WHY UGGGGGGH?