Portrayals of sports journalists in pop culture
This month's research roundup, featuring The Players Tribune and a lot of movies
Welcome to our monthly Research Roundup. One of the main purposes of this newsletter is to talk about the interesting research into sports journalism and sports media that’s come across my screen.
I’m starting with a piece that was supposed to be in last month’s roundup, but that one ran a little long and I wanted to keep it focused on working papers from AEJMC. My friend and frequent co-author Dr. Michael Mirer published a study in Communication and Sport that examines how athletes view their relationship with sports journalists through posts on The Players Tribune. Mirer pointed out something I hadn’t thought of in stark terms - that the very founding of theThe Players Tribune in 2015 is rooted in an inherent critique of sports journalism and the power that journalists have to frame athlete’s experiences.
Mirer conducted a textual analysis of 110 pieces from a seven-year span to see how athletes view the role of independent sports media, how they describe life in the media spotlight, how it feels to be a source for sports journalists, and how they see sports journalists as able to provide insight into elite sports.
Mirer found:
The relationship between athletes and sports journalists that sits at the center of the sports-media production complex is as fraught as it is routine.
One of the things I found interesting was that the athletes who felt they had a positive relationship with the media still held them at arm’s length. They were on good terms with reporters but believed that the journalists still didn’t really know the whole, real story. Even insiders were not really on the inside.
Mirer found that athletes often view sports journalists as a “depersonalized source of criticism” — this is the critique of THE MEDIA as a single entity — and that reporters don’t know about the impact established routines can have on athletes. One example came from Clint Malarchuk, who has to relive the trauma of nearly dying in an NHL game every time a player gets similarly injured. These issues are exacerbated for black women athletes.
The main point is that, given outlets like The Players Tribune and social media, athletes are not seeing the inherent need or value in dealing with reporters, that it is at best an obligation to be tolerated. Mirer writes:
The idea that athletes and sports figures can speak to broader audiences without cutting journalists into the transaction is a clear challenge to sports journalism’s place in the information system. This analysis also saw athletes questioning the value of media rituals like the interview during a contractual media availability. The access to audience granted by outlets like The Players’ Tribune or social media also may force a reconsideration of the relationship between players and their employers.
And now, on to this month’s main event:
In the Fall of 2022, the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Project published a special issue of its journal dedicated to the portrayal of sports journalists.
Writing the introduction to the issue, editors Laura Castañeda, Richard R. Ness, Joe Saltzman, Matthew C. Ehrlich write:
Sports have long been an important window into our society, with popular culture regularly featuring the sports journalist as a prominent character. Sports reporters and writers in movies, novels, television, and other popular media have not been much different from their “straight news” counterparts, although their venue has made them unique. There have been syndicated sports columnists who do anything to get an exclusive, including using blackmail and payoffs. But the majority of sportswriter characters simply have gone out and done their jobs. Some have been heroic in ferreting out corruption in sports, risking public animosity. Most often they have been used as realistic dressing for biographies of sports personalities.
The issue contains nine pieces dedicated to the topic, whether it is a look at a specific journalist in a movie, or an overview of a type ff media and how sports journalists are portrayed in that. We’ve already discussed Julianna Kirschner’s study on Trent Crimm, The Independent.
In the interest of space, I’m going to do bullet points on each of the essays:
• To kick off the issue, Daniel Durbin makes the important point: “Predictably, sports journalists are relatively rare in the movies. Sports films are a small though important genre and journalists have only appeared in an even smaller number of those films.”
Durbin1 identifies three primary ways that sports journalists are portrayed in movies — as a sort of Greek Chorus providing exposition or moving the plot along; real sports journalists playing themselves to add a dose of reality to sports movies (Durbin cites Vin Scully calling the game in For The Love of the Game); and a sort of “wish fulfillment” where the sports journalist is living the common man’s dream. Examples of this last one are the Katherine Hepurn/Spencer Tracy movie, Woman of the Year.
Durbin writes:
The image of the sports journalist in film, then, largely reflects the image of the sports journalist in public life. The sports journalist typically appears as an expositor, a narrative facilitator. The bulk of movies represent the real or fictional sports journalist as an extension of the storyteller. The sports journalist is not a protagonist but a character who explains, moves forward, and indicates the sentiment of the story. The sports journalist is our link to the sports heroes of our public lore.
• Brock Adams writes about how Ed Axelby2, portrayed by Ed O’Neill in the 1994 movie Blue Chips. He examines the morality of Axelby’s actions and motivations writing “Is he bound by the moral standards instilled by SPJ to report the truth objectively? Or, is he looking to expose the legend Pete Bell and figuratively mount the Western University men’s basketball program scandal as a trophy on his wall?” Adams, who links the movie to the context of college basketball and the sports’ actual and perceived corruption over the last 40 years, points out that it is the journalist who provokes Nick Nolte’s climatic speech. “Axelby, a journalist acting as the objective liaison seeking the truth regardless of his true intentions, is the one holding hima ccountable to the public. “
• Ben Carrington3 examines the image of the black sports journalist, noting that the only real representation of a black sports journalist in film was Wendell Smith in 42 — and Smith’s role in helping integrate Major League Baseball is marginalized in the movie. Carrington links the lack of racial representation screen with the lack of representation in actual press boxes. He writes:
In nearly all of these cases, whether or not the subject matter is related to race, or black life and struggle is represented, there is rarely any depiction of black sports journalists on screen or feature-length films based upon the work of black writers. The fleeting glimpses and secondary story lines given to sports journalists, in the few times they do appear, are overwhelmingly those of white male sports journalists. This dearth of cinematic representation reflects, to some degree, the marginal position of black journalists within the sports media industries.
• Donna Halper looked at the lack of women sports journalists throughout the history of pop culture. The first, she identified, was Pat Danbury (played by Astrid Allwyn) in the 1940 movie The Leather Pushers. Halper found that women covering sports was often either a fish-out-of-water plot device (women knowing about sports? LOL!) or the means for a woman to find a husband. It wasn’t until the 1990s that women sports journalists began appearing with some regularity.
At least it is no longer unusual to read books where women characters like sports, or devotedly follow their favorite team. And fortunately, the stereotype of the clueless female who has no idea what a fly ball is no longer dominates comedy routines. But given how many young women and girls participate in sports, it still seems like a missed opportunity that they have so few opportunities to encounter female characters who love sports just as much as they do.
• Alan Tomlinson discussed how sports journalists are portrayed in novels, focusing on Max Mercy in The Natural, Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, and Jimmy Stirling in The Man who Hated Football. These are very different characters in very different stories. But Tomlinson discovered similarities:
“Decades and cultures apart, the figures of Max Mercy, Frank Bascombe and Jimmy Stirling exist in a sexist and bigoted male-dominated world that has reproduced generation after generation a dominant culture of masculinity and machismo … their fictional fates and futures remind us of the slog of the job, the ethical dodginess of the trade, and the price paid in dysfunctional relationships of family and community for committing yourself to the career of the sports journalist.
• Chad Painter takes on sports journalists on TV, looking at Sports Night, the Odd Couple, Everybody Loves Raymond, My Boys, and Brockmire. The deep dive into Sports Night is worth its own post at some point4. But he makes a really interesting point about the portrayal of sports journalists on TV — that while they are all successful professionally, they are not so successful outside of work.
“If, as Ehrlich & Saltzman (2015) argue, popular culture can be a powerful tool for thinking about what journalism is and should be, then viewers of these programs ultimately will likely have a positive view of sports journalists, though that view might be colored by the idea that these journalists often have to sacrifice their personal lives for professional success.”
• James Cartee III does a deep dive into the depiction of Harry Kingsley in the Disney movie Iron Will. Applying Semiotics Theory, Cartee notes that within the context of the movie, “Kingsley serves as a living symbol for the following values: hope, affirmation, and perseverance.”
• Finally, Jeff Fellenzer interviewed director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, Cobb, Tin Cup) about the portrayal of sports journalists in his movies and in movies in general. Shelton said he is currently working on a movie about Ted Williams based on the legendary Richard Ben Cramer 1986 profile of him from Esquire.
Shelton said:
Drama is based on characters in conflict. The basic rule of writing is: Desire meets opposition. Every scene I write, I look at what is the want, what is the opposition. The sportswriter in film – or any journalist – is a useful antagonist to provide the opposition, although the opposition can be something used for good, such as opposing the company lie about, for example, steroid use in baseball.”
So I want to try something fun here, based on this and the fun I had in breaking down the portrayal of Trent Crimm, The Independent.
It will be semi-regular look at the portrayal of sports journalists in movies and TV shows. Honestly, these are the kinds of random rabbit holes this newsletter is made to explore.5
So every now and then, I’ll take a sports movie or TV show that includes the portrayal of a sports journalist and write about it. One of the first will be an examination of journalism norms and routines, as seen through Ed Axelby’s behavior during the climactic scene of Blue Chips.6
My only complaint about Durbin’s well done piece is that he threw in a 13 seconds reference. I don’t need that extra negativity in my life.
This is not the last reference this post will have to Ed Axelby.
I’ve heard Ben speak at conferences, red a lot of his work, and holy smokes he is one of the smartest people you’ll ever be around.
This is called foreshadowing.
Tell me you listen to a lot of Pablo Torre Finds Out without telling me you listen to a lot of Pablo Torre Finds Out.
See? Told you so.