Let’s Talk About Bias In Sports Journalism

Objective reporting is one standard by which “legitimate” sportswriters are judged, but does such a measure even make sense any more?

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The following are things I’ve written about journeyman NBA meatpatty Raymond Felton. In the interest of not typing until I drown beneath the rising sea, I’ve limited the list to disses dished during the 2013–14 NBA season:

Raymond Felton trails helplessly behind his man “like a piece of toilet paper on a stripper’s heel.”

Raymond Felton plays like someone who has taken to “much imbibing in fatty meats.”

Raymond Felton’s drives harken “a condor that’s been shot out of the sky.”

Raymond Felton has “the ugliest mother fucking jump shot I’ve ever seen.”

A more self-respecting reporter might meet these flails of authorial power with a simple, pointed question: “Don’t you feel bad about writing stuff like that?”

Nope!

It’s not that I think Raymond Felton is a bad person. Although, you know, firearms. I just think he’s a pretty terrible starting point guard in the NBA. A job, mind you, that pays him millions of dollars a year.

Why does any of this matter, you ask?

The explosion of blogs — team-centric and otherwise — has completely transformed the world of sports reporting. For the better, I’d wager, ledger considered in full. And yet, the profession’s upper crust is still beholden to that most mendacious of media monoliths: objectivity. “The view from nowhere,” a professor of mine once called it. I never forgot that. He also used “galloping horse shit” a lot.

I never forgot that, either. Galloping horseshit. What fun to say.

It’s worth bearing in mind that objectivity in journalism was a decidedly 21st-century phenomenon. During the preceding centuries, the media landscape was fairly riddled with widely-read rags from across the political spectrum. You can thank, among others, Walter Lippmann — one of the founding editors of The New Republic — for this intellectual about-face. As it happens, Lippmann also became one of the foremost visionaries in the study and use of propaganda as a way of steering public opinion. That is not a coincidence: When media are confined to the same lexiconic plane, the subsequent conformity breeds a homogeneity of engagement, where intellectual manipulation is much easier to achieve. Objectivity, therefore, is the Trojan horse of power. And this applies as much to sport as war planning.

Lest we digress: You can have an opinion or a perspective — a view from somewhere — and still get your facts straight. These facts being, essentially, statistics and their attendant analyses. There’s just no earthly reason to write that Felton shot 2-of-19 with 11 turnovers if it didn’t actually happen. Which it probably did.

When a writer synthesizes facts to cull a personal perspective, it shouldn’t be seen as compromising the power or poignancy of a piece. If anything, the resulting honesty — hostile though the tone and tenor may be — reminds the reader that the writers whose work they support are actually quite a bit like them: sports purists who demand perfection, often to the detriment of reason.

(AP)

The suggestion here isn’t that reporter subjectivity is somehow being subjugated. The rise of Bill Simmons, to use perhaps the most polarizing example, proves there’s a market for the unabashedly biased. (Even if his fan-first zealotry ultimately sealed his purge from the Mothership.) The fact that bias boasts a billion different voices is a boon, not a burden, to greater discourse. And with the fantastic growth of sports websites — many of which celebrate those biases — the case can be made that objectivity for the sake of itself is finally on the wane.

Try this thought experiment. Think of your typical NBA arena. Every seat, from first-row folding chair to that guy with an entire section to himself huffing glue in the arena’s nosebleeds, has its own vantage point. It’s not merely that seeing or talking about the game in the same terms is philosophically or journalistically impossible; it’s physically impossible.

This logic can be applied to reporting. Our angles — in this case, our own preconceived biases forged by bad tastes and serotonin-oozing memories — inform the way we think and feel about a specific team, whether we realize it or not.

“Yes,” one might say, “but it’s the reporter’s job to try her best to subsume those subjective instincts for the sake of the reader.”

Is it, though?

Many writers and reporters still heed this dictum, often to brilliant, paradigmatic ends. After all, the degree of difficulty in rendering the rigid enrapturing — of letting facts and quotes fertilize whatever poetry lies below — is inherently higher. The limited lexicon demands as much.

The question is why we limit it to begin with. Objectivity makes some semblance of sense in the political sphere, where the societal stakes are so much higher. To the extent that political journalism’s goal (heavy, heavy emphasis) is to give the public the best, most relevant information, bringing personal biases to bear makes for a tricky balancing act — nay near an impossible one. Although at it’s Hunter-Thompson-best, it can do more to elicit change and engagement than any upper-fold fodder from the New York Times.

Sports, though, at their core, are pastimes; our respite from the rancid rancor of politics. They’re outlets —physical, emotional, psychological — through which we can exercise our innate competitiveness in an arena that, when all’s said and done, doesn’t entail near the life-and-death decisions we see wielded in Washington.

Watching the Knicks, for me, is a chance to frolic in a fucked-up alternate universe where nothing makes sense. Where nothing is supposed to make sense. So why does so much of the attendant analysis — and plenty of my own work fits shit-snugly into this category — read like a dispatch from a Department of Agriculture subcommittee hearing?

It’s okay to take sports seriously. One could argue, as I have and will, that these pastimes provide a relatively stakes-free forum in which to flex our inherently human competitive bent. There are no shortage of disheartening exceptions, of course. And there’s certainly a case to be made that exercising these muscles — to beat you, to be the best, to win at any cost — only gets our jingoistic juices coursing faster, such that our civic faculties inherently suffer.

But it’s also okay to occasionally step beyond the rah-rah rancor and recognize sports for what they are: games. Quite literally the antithesis of seriousness.

Why, then, do sports media’s most widely consumed outlets — your ESPNs, the dinosaur dailies, etc. — continue to trumpet objectivity (whether intentionally or implicitly) lock and stock? It’s easy to see Simmons as a harbinger of subjectivity’s ascent. In reality, his role on NBA Countdown felt more like a token gesture than a genuine bellwether; a way for the industry elite to say, “See, the bloggers have a voice!” Before, you know, firing him.

Recent dramatics aside, and whatever your opinion of the man, The Sports Guy has helped cleave open a long-neglected niche. One that has undoubtedly survived, grown, and thrived despite a very real, and very entrenched, opposition. Even if these gatekeepers don’t see themselves as such. Stigmas against caustic, cavalier reporting remain, particularly on the beat. But it’s only a matter of time before these shifting tectonics thrust up a fresh new terra — one where cutting-edge stats and new narrative sensibilities usurp the salt-choked dust bowls of the beat. Where imagination and creativity are encouraged and rewarded, rather than glared into corners (or next to Spencer Hawes).

The propagation of biased content that is at once compelling, informative, and entertaining — a wonderful thing, right? But how many of the most nationally renowned writers regularly take the kind of risks that have become commonplace within the greater sports blogosphere? They can’t. They’d have their badges snatched faster than they could say “media room brickwich platter of shame.” That’s not just a sad byproduct of J-School gospel; it’s a very real reflection of the existential crisis currently unfurling within traditional media.

Even the old-school scribes have their biases, of course. They just come through in different ways — in their sources and subjects, in whom they choose to highlight and why. But it’s the lip-serviced commitment to objective reporting (not the accomplishment thereof, which, as we know, is impossible) that remains the last, staunches line of truncheons in the way of a full-blown sportswriting revolution. One, in fact, that might actually make us better, saner people where it matters more — and most.

That it’s a buyer’s market for perspectival sports journalism is no secret: With a seemingly limitless supply of content and only so many eyes and minds to consume it — to say nothing of advertising dollars going to precious few outlets — the craft remains, for far too many, an unpaid passion. And until the media-consuming public realizes that a mammoth majority of what comes out of locker-room reporting is little more than buffering fluff, that dynamic isn’t likely to change.

But as with any generational sea change (ahem), time is seldom on the shore’s side. Which is why, I dare to hope, fans will eventually demand some semblance of creativity from those tasked with covering Raymond Felton reacting to guys blowing by him like a bigger kid just copped his cotton candy at a carnival.