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Newsroom Ethics and Sports Journalists
Marie Hardin
Sports journalists also face a type of competition not faced by most of their newsroom counterparts, in the form of direct competition from the athletes, teams and leagues they cover through Web sites and cable operations such as those operated by the NFL. As sports media critic Robert Weintraub points out, gone are the days when the beat reporter was the sole conduit of news about athletes and teams. Major League Baseball has its own "reporters," for instance, who post stories designed to compete with those published in mainstream media outlets.
Hence, the problem, as I see it, is how to reconcile the motivation for many journalists who go into sports-a desire not to be journalists as much as to cover sports, with the unique ethical pressures that reside there-with the ethical standards of journalism. It is obvious that to deliver serious, meaningful coverage requires the willingness to outgrow toybox image and practices.
The Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) organization has taken steps to help the industry focus on issues of professionalism and ethics. For instance, it has an ethics code that addresses "freebies" and other potential conflicts of interest. But this code falls short in several areas: It fails to address some of the stickier issues that have troubled sports journalists of late-for instance, those involving gambling on sports and voting in sports polls.
A growing number of news organizations have addressed both by banning this sort of voting and gambling by staffers, but the proportion that have done so is still low, according to a survey of sports editors conducted by the Penn State Center for Sports Journalism (see table). The survey also found, as expected, that smaller papers have fewer written guidelines about sports journalism issues than do larger news organizations. The problem there is that many journalists (including sports journalists) who graduate from programs like ours get their first job in a small newsroom. Bad habits can develop there, and they may be hard to break as a journalist moves up through the ranks.
Hence, the problem, as I see it, is how to reconcile the motivation for many journalists who go into sports-a desire not to be journalists as much as to cover sports, with the unique ethical pressures that reside there-with the ethical standards of journalism. It is obvious that to deliver serious, meaningful coverage requires the willingness to outgrow toybox image and practices.
The Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) organization has taken steps to help the industry focus on issues of professionalism and ethics. For instance, it has an ethics code that addresses "freebies" and other potential conflicts of interest. But this code falls short in several areas: It fails to address some of the stickier issues that have troubled sports journalists of late-for instance, those involving gambling on sports and voting in sports polls.
A growing number of news organizations have addressed both by banning this sort of voting and gambling by staffers, but the proportion that have done so is still low, according to a survey of sports editors conducted by the Penn State Center for Sports Journalism (see table). The survey also found, as expected, that smaller papers have fewer written guidelines about sports journalism issues than do larger news organizations. The problem there is that many journalists (including sports journalists) who graduate from programs like ours get their first job in a small newsroom. Bad habits can develop there, and they may be hard to break as a journalist moves up through the ranks.
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