Telling truth journalists’ primary job

Journalist Walter Lippman once said, “I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, `Put not your trust in princes.’ Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.” He wrote that in his New York Times column in 1967 as he bid adieu to his newspaper colleagues.

Replace “princes” with “athletes and coaches” in today’s sports world and the statement still holds up. It is a troubling fact for those who cover the games at the college and professional levels. It is a question of journalistic integrity.

Journalism originally involved the written word and those who wrote them in newspapers and magazines. The New York Times long ago defined the role of those it hires to write, and displays its maxim on the front page every day: “All The News That’s Fit to Print.”

Journalism has expanded to radio and television news departments, tested by their off-shoots, from so-called tabloids to “news” television shows that re-enact “the facts.” So, just where do the people who write and broadcast sports fit into this highly unstructured and ever-evolving work called “journalism?”

I raise this issue because of two personally disquieting events this past week. One, a broadcast friend of mine, was told by a high-level Major League Baseball team executive, in a rather off-the-cuff sentence, “You’re not a journalist, you know.” That invoked some lively discussion in the dugout.

Two, a writer who covers MLB was called on the carpet by another MLB official because the official didn’t like a story written about the team. This so-called “information session” smelled to the writer like a “thumb on the head, get with the program session.”

Increasingly, players, coaches, and team officials at both the pro and college levels view the people who cover them as adjunct parties. These team people want the company line printed and they don’t want the negative to see the light of day.

College athletes get paid off and befriended in violation of NCAA rules every day, everywhere. Few, if any of the press that covers these teams investigates such stories, even when good leads exist. Their punishment would be the wrath of the coach and players and probably the silent treatment.

Worse, many of the media outlets in these hometowns want no part of this messy stuff, since coverage of local teams is a big part of why people buy the paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio. They don’t want a backlash of supporters to start boycotting their advertisers.

Coverage of such negative, though factual, issues is guaranteed to raise the ire of local fans who want to believe their favorite programs are pure, or at least no worse than the others. It becomes “the everybody elat least no worse than the others. It becomes “the everybody else does it” argument. Professional teams are no different and can bring to bear even greater financial threats, although the risk is greater since those in the press who cover pro teams are far more independent and might blow the cover off any such attempt.

Nevertheless, what we’re talking about here is usually one writer or broadcaster who has one of “those” stories and must decide to run with it or take the easy road and forget he/she ever heard the facts. The whole purpose behind team officials raising the journalist issue with a reporter is to put pressure on, to think twice the next time. It is a subversive and often indirect act against those who cover sports, many of whom would like to think the facts still matter.

As the monetary stakes grow in the business of sports, the question of whether a reporter is part of the PR for the team or a journalist becomes more pronounced and more important. So, too, does the answer to the question, as the pressures increase from both within and without the reporters own media outlet.

The New Yorker’s editors once wrote, “We believe that the truth can turn up in a cartoon, in one of the magazine’s covers, in a poem, in a short story, in an essay, in an editorial comment, in a humor piece, in a critical piece, in a reporting piece. And if a single principle transcends all the others and informs all the others, it is to try to tell the truth.”

So, too, with sports reporting.