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i am a big sports fan. i have always loved to watch sports of all kinds. quite a bit of my early reading experience came from the sports pages of the minot newspaper which we received at the cafe my parents owned. when i have had cable, my favorite channels were always espn/espn 2/espn news, etc. most recently, i have gotten into sports talk radio so even without cable i get plenty of info on sports.
so here’s a trend i am noticing… sports news is turning into tabloids. everytime i tune in, or go to cnnsi.com or espn.com, i find news regarding the off-the-field exploits of players and coaches. not that these things aren’t important to report, because they impact the games that we follow. it just seems as though it’s getting to be overkill. it seems as though the majority of the talk i hear on the radio centers around mike vick’s dog fighting, the cincinnati bengals, or barry bonds/jason giambi/floyd landis doping allegations.
i think a major part of the problem is that sports media coverage has exploded over the past two decades or so. i can remember when there was only one espn channel. now there are multiple full-time sports channels, multiple radio outlets, multiple websites, all covering the same things. media is big business and the competition is growing. they all need to crack the next big story or expose the next big scandal.
even beyond the negative stuff, they seem to overkill every angle possible about the games. just last week chicago and detroit were playing in the eastern conference semi-finals, chicago had fallen behind 3 games to 0 and then managed to win 2 straight. it was a fascinating series to start watching at that point, i can agree with that, but chicago still would have needed to win 2 more games before being the first team to come back from 3-0 down in 7-game nba playoff series. both espn and sports illustrated killed this series by talking about the possibility of chicago coming back to win. it was the lead story on both sites. there were multiple writers weighing in and sports illustrated ran a photo album depicting the 10 greatest comebacks in nba playoff history. my major problem with this, as i stated already, chicago needed to win 2 more games! they hadn’t even tied the series yet and all the talk centered around the possibility of the greatest comeback in league history. not surprisingly, chicago lost game 6 and the series ended.
on the radio, there are a wealth of callers who start their statments with some variation of the following: “the problem with the media is…” and while i often agree with the points they make about the media, let me just say this: the problem with the media is not the media. they are simply doing their jobs. the problem with the media is that we keep listening. we keep buying. we keep tuning in. we don’t seem to care that sports news has gone further away from talking about sports and more about talking about scandal and rumor and hyperbole. i refuse to believe that the humans who are participating in sports are less moral or worse in character now than they have been in the past. we just get to see it magnified on a much different scale.
chances are, i’ll keep listening to the radio and i’ll keep reading the wesites, it would just be nice to hear and read about the actual sports from time to time.
