The Afterword on Sports Journalism part 2

welcome back to the afterward a conversation about the future of words we are glad to have matt vereen and dr brian denham here with us to continue our conversation about building sports communities through media we talked in the first part of the episode about general topics around sports journalism kind of understanding what it is where it's positioned and what it can do now let's look at some of the specifics how does the media address issues of substance use in sports and society yeah i mean i think they're they're unavoidable i mean just look at the olympics right now that are going on doping has constantly been a discussion point there it's happening right now with with russian athletes and in ice skating right now i believe there's a 15 year old who won gold for the team competition and she was found to have failed her doping test as far as which is something russia's consistently had an issue with it's the reason they have to go by the russian olympic committee roc right now in the olympics as opposed to being called russia as other countries would but of course you're talking about a 15 year old there are rules about whether a 15 year old can be held accountable for a failed doping test because they couldn't have made that decision themselves it was something that was put on them by the leadership of the team so these are things that are they're unavoidable in the olympics you also look at dui's would technically fall under under substance abuse and athletes all the time are in the news for a dui or for for drug abuse and things like this though i would say the media a lot of times probably covers it a little closer to tmz than they should by talking specifically about the headline of it you know athlete pulled over for dui rather than talking about the larger issues in impacts and trends that these are are simply you know just an element of and finding solutions to these issues that are clearly prevalent within the sports world yes i had mentioned that uh that 1970 series i was uh studying in sports illustrated and one of the reasons i decided to do that is to look at how when there's this big story in the magazine what are the patterns that follow it and sure enough just like in the 21st century with this the sports illustrated expose on baseball this one prompted a couple of politicians to demand uh that sports clean up their act they held hearings and even within hearings you can find a familiar cast of characters when they get hauled in to talk before congress so there are some patterns what bothers me sometimes is that even when there's a great sport a great sport series for example the new york times i believe in 2012 or 13 did a great series on abuses in horse racing and they really laid it all out there and and just lots of articles and great reporting and horse racing they had the hearings and everything and they were going to clean up their act but if you're following the news now you can look at the one race track in los angeles that has horse death after horse death and nothing has changed in that respect trainers are still being having their credentials questioned and so so it's the same story over and over and that's unfortunate yeah i mean it is interesting i'm so um appreciative brian um that you're bringing that historical perspective um you know we've had other guests on our show that bring a perspective based in history whether it's an educational trend or it's a sports journalism trend whatever it may be you know unfortunately if you don't know history it you're doomed to repeat it and so it does seem like some of these stories are cropping back up again and matt you were talking about the russian doping thing and you know this is not new um you know so you hear that absolutely quite fascinating uh the last russian doping scandal uh in sochi that was uh in part to make sure that the russian athletes excelled such that putin would be more popular and therefore people there would would support invading ukraine and he would have this popularity and that's exactly what happened right they invaded ukraine now it's a little different story but ukraine is back in the news again with russian troops there so he doesn't have the power he did to mobilize opinion of him then but still it's a fascinating story can i just jump back to something else i i thought about this in uh in terms of politics particularly in some other countries but i remember when i was living in guatemala in 2011 or 12 and they were hosting a presidential race and guatemala is the only central american country that hasn't sent a team to the world cup so one of the presidential candidates made the center point of his campaign i'll get guatemala to the world cup now how the president of a country does that was never really clear but that was that was a big part of his game it came in second in the presidential uh race and there were you know eight or ten candidates it was it really did influence that election in a big way and you think about other places around the world i think there was a book even on soccer and and how it something like how soccer explains the world oh yeah that a journalist did and a lot of it had to do with the politics related to soccer and how much it influences the campaigns elections economies um conflict things like that and has a history in religion as well with uh catholics playing against protestants and so forth so it's a fascinating game with a very rich history to it and the rivalries in europe in particular are fierce i would just like to hear his plan for doing that because aside from wiping out the united states and mexico from the concacaf i don't know how you're going to get that country in there yeah i think a lot of us wanted to hear that plan and we're rather thankful that he didn't slide all the way into the presidency exactly my goodness well you know let's keep let's go down this this road just a little bit further and think about how just like with these current olympics that we're in right now we've had a lot of sports journalism talking about the location of where olympics are even being held right now and um how this is being presented with a nod to some human rights and uh matt you touched it a little bit about even getting into sports journalism and why we need to maybe see some more of that diversity so what do you think brian how are sports journalists able to tap into this a little bit many sports journalists are part of larger corporations who may or may not have an interest in being highly critical of the system of government in some land there's all kinds of business for example with china and a lot of people have pointed to human rights abuses there and that that the olympics shouldn't have been there but depending on who the sports journalist works for that person may see a story oh slightly edited let's say or encouraged to cover a different angle just be because of outside pressures there's supposed to be a wall there you know there should be autonomy for for sports journalists like all journalists to report but the reality is uh that's a touchy subject and there's more at stake uh but sport incidents have caused international incidents so matt probably can think of a few of those yeah so i mean what you're talking about we would refer to in the business as the separation of church and state and the sales department and the journalists are supposed to be two separate entities who have almost no interaction with each other no matter what literally at my last station they were on the second level and we were on the first level of the building and they weren't allowed to walk into the newsroom because they didn't want any level of interaction there but as that is a local television station like brian's talking about at higher levels it becomes a bit different you look at espn is owned by disney corporation well for quite a while they have broadcasted the little league world series these are kids from across the world playing baseball well the kids from taiwan are not allowed to be called taiwan in the little league world series they're called chinese taipei when they compete in that that is specifically an initiative to not upset china there are a lot of those the bigger the company gets the more exerted pressure they have and granted the broadcasting of the game isn't as much of the journalism that we would be referring to as far as the checks on human rights that would happen elsewhere but i think they're unavoidable credit to nbc and their coverage a lot of journalists eyes were on them when they opened this olympic coverage and whether they would even talk about it at all and it was the very first thing they talked about when the olympic coverage started was the human rights issues and i don't think a lot of people were expecting that so it's not as if it doesn't ever happen but they're certainly fighting a lot of pressure from the parental company when they do that yeah that makes perfect sense and i i for one was a little bit shocked you know i can remember some of the sports journalists that were reporting especially on um some of the chess matches between some of the chess players and i know we probably don't think about chess being a sport like sucker but it's highly competitive and huge story to think about how the players were pitted in countries uh for specific reasons just like you were saying brian yeah well it's hard to talk about issues around sports and journalism without talking about the elephant in the room coven um you mentioned this earlier matt but let's kind of expand on it how's covid affected or affecting sports reporting you mean aside from the fact that we're doing this on zoom right now i mean everything that we're doing is impacted by it i remember the day it mainly hit i was um i was set to interview a basketball team over in springfield missouri jury university their women's team was ranked number one in the country were undefeated the best team and were by far the favorites to win the first ever women's national championship for that school so i was there on the day that it was announced that no fans were going to be allowed to these games so i show up to the arena to interview the team after practice when i see a coach wander into the practice looking very upset and that's when i checked my phone and realized that no longer are no fans gonna be allowed there they've canceled the tournament entirely and you could hear a pin drop in that arena as players started coming out just in tears and you learned a certain level of respect for being in that moment i dropped my camera to the ground i didn't film it at all because it wasn't a moment that should have been captured it started impacting everything from there as sports were shut down to now even as we pick it back up most press conferences are done like this on zoom a lot of interviews are done and that can be a good thing a lot of times if someone is unreachable i can't get to them the ability to interview them on zoom is a very useful tool but at the same time you know you're looking at the quality of that interview maybe drops there's less ability to do a check on someone in power over a zoom interview that's not something that's that's very easy to do you've also seen it in just the coverage of sports there's a lot less reporter traveling going on uh for instance if you watch a major league baseball game recently odds are the play-by-play people calling that game aren't actually at the game if their team is the away team they're probably calling it remotely which means that they're not there to actually talk to the players to talk to the coaches to get a feel for the emotion that's behind the sports because it's gone into a far more of a remote coverage through things like zoom and that can be good and bad and i think a lot of us within the business are hoping that on the other side of this we go back to in person though i think a lot of universities and teams would be okay with it staying here to have that certain level of security and wall that stays between the two there's definitely that wall there they can simply press on to the next reporter of course some some coaches have always done that if they get a question they don't like they attempt to embarrass the reporter in front of his peers and start asking the reporter questions or what have you but one of the things that i've been interested in when it first occurred when coven first happened was the influence of athletes on demanding that their sports play anyway this happened in college football and it always amazed me that 18 year olds would have such a commanding presence in sort of shaming leagues into playing and it created all kinds of problems the one year uh where the big ten i believe started late in their football games they had these bizarre records for the postseason like four and one or something and what to do right and who deserved to go to the playoff uh and you know journalists did re they reported it it was there you know here's what happened but from a persuasion standpoint it it struck me as unfortunate and here we are you know parents showing up at the big ten office and demanding to see the commissioner and those stories they got reported but a lot of people said good for them without any concern whatsoever that this could be a fairly serious virus and we should probably think it through before just securing your entertainment for the evening so wow these are excellent points um you know i can definitely um hear the both and in the benefits of yes we don't have to travel we can report on something but yet having this other negativity is is definitely a withdrawal i mean i love listening to clemson football on the radio i prefer rather watching the game um you know so everybody with that enthusiasm broadcasting and being remote i don't know if they would get the same level of enthusiasm like what matt was saying you know so um i i do i do hope that there will be some return without some of the negativity i imagine you didn't have as much enthusiasm about this past season for clemson football though it's maybe here hey it you know we're all allowed a hiccup it's okay that's the hiccup all right um you know you touched a little bit on this brian in our earlier uh episode about commercialization of sports and how that affects sports writing and broadcasting and you even use the word celebrity um because with celebrity there's commercialization you know you don't you don't get to be a celebrity without selling something whether you know whatever product from a bobble head to a you know can of coke whatever so how does that impact what you all do as journalists well uh matt might be you know he's a practicing journalist he might be able to shed some light on that were you discussing the role of celebrity absolutely i mean i think that there's all kinds of degrees with commercialization i think first of all that that element of the the digitalization and the commercialization combined have resulted in a wave of teams themselves investing a lot of resources in their own reporters and media groups and everything and there are a lot of pros to that a lot of these reporters that you'll find on twitter who have a lot of the information on the team have a lot greater access because they're hired by the team they're right there they get the information first but at the same time you have to understand that they're not going to give you the bad information they're only going to give you the good stuff there's a there's a wall of bias there that you won't be able to overcome but at the same time that's the source of all this growing you know jobs that are within sports journalism in that digital sphere is they're not in traditional journalism they haven't studied that journalism degree they're just people who can make a good video and make an enticing thing for consumption so you have to have a certain level of a consumer of knowing who you're getting it from on the other side of journalism i think that as we talked about earlier as the profits have been less and less with digitalization commercialization has increased and so that wall of church and state that i referenced earlier has eroded more and more i know that in a previous job of mine i won't say which one uh but i was told by our sales team and our news director had gotten together and i was forced every saturday to run a 30-second piece that was sponsored which a viewer submitted photo of a hunter and their trophy of the week and it was sponsored by a local company um i at that time was about to leave for my next job so i didn't personally fight it had i been there longer those kinds of things a real problem that native content element of these sponsored deals that in my opinion aren't even really sports uh but they make a certain amount of money for the company which is all these traditional medias are just trying to stay afloat in any way they can so there are a lot of positives with the commercialization of sports and there are also a lot of negatives especially within the realm of journalism okay but matt before you i i have to know what was one of the examples of the of the trophies it's uh i had to show a guy who was holding a deer he had shot and let's just say he hadn't cleaned this deer before he took the photo so i i literally talked to my sports director and was like and we both agreed like there are kids watching the news like showing a bloody carcass doesn't feel like a great thing and it was something they had wanted months before that we had presented that to them and they said you know what that's a good thought we won't do it and then a few months later there was no discussion it was just hey you're doing this starting the saturday here's the photo you're running this week and so they've gotten a bit sneakier about you know at that point now we don't have a choice it's already been approved and we're contractually obligated as as us with my company but these are things that you know we fight when we can and we don't and they're just things that consumers should be aware of when they see them all right well thanks for sharing sorry what effect are independent podcasters having on yeah well they're dragging me on the podcast like this one no it's it's good i think that podcasts have opened up discussions and have exposed a lot of journalists a lot of times i'm convinced for instance on weeknights i have like three minutes in a sports in a television and local news for sports very difficult to condense the complexity of sports journalism into me talking for 30 seconds and then a 30 second sound bite from a coach or an athlete podcasts and elements like this are far more long standing you're able to more explain the complexities that surround these issues and bring on voices that wouldn't have had access otherwise so i think it's a great movement you know one aspect of commercialization as well that people have to realize when they they go into particularly sports broadcasting is if they're women there's going to be a good bit of sexualization of them and if you uh choose to go into the profession you almost have to realize that you may end up on a top 10 list of the hottest quote hottest sports broadcasters and some people choose to use that which is fine by me they're saying hey you know if that's what is going to increase my ratings or whatever or make me popular and i'm going to use that others would say no that's ridiculous i don't want to be known for being a hot sports caster i want to be known for being a competent sportscaster and but it's a reality you know some would be on a magazine cover and uh there was a lot of resentment in the sports world years ago when the tennis player anna kournikova made so much money doing calendars and so forth because she was simply physically attractive she had never won a major tournament and a lot of people resented that and so commercialization she just chose to exploit her own sexuality and made a fortune she wasn't a journalist but some have chosen that route and that's their prerogative i don't necessarily blame them matt do you think you're going to get on a list of the top 50 hottest sports journalists this year if you do share that with us okay if i do my mom will be is so proud she'll have that printed out in an instant but i i think that you know as much as i would love that like brian's talking about there are definitely negatives to it as well nothing has disgusted me more in my life than reading the emails and inbox messages that certain female co-workers of mine have received they are a despicable thing that i think goes back to a previous thing we talked about in missing perspectives in journalism no one should have to endure that just to do a job that they want to do that in lots of cases pays 30 000 a year i mean it is the number of people who are weeded out based only on that i know plenty of friends i've had who have quit the business because they could not go through that end of it and the other end of your woman you shouldn't be speaking in the realm of men's sports it's there are a lot of things that are gone as there's more access to journalists and this commercialization the digitalization it's all interconnected and some of it is positive and a lot of it is negative and finding solutions to these things is something we should look into but they're certainly by no means simple solutions um well said that all right we have one final question what's a metaphor to help us better understand sports journalism let matt take that one i'm trying to think of one earlier and there are several that could apply uh but uh matt do you have one uh i mean i would say the number one thing is that to lay a foundation to this there is not as much difference between news journalism and sports journalism as people like to emphasize they are both one and the same sports journalism is news journalism but traditional to draw a metaphor around it i suppose a traditional news reporter is like the medicine i guess if i use like it's a symbol and not a metaphor traditional news journalism is the medicine that you force feed to a dog that doesn't want it it is important and integral to them being well-rounded consumers and members of a civilization they need that medicine sports journalism is wrapping a piece of cheese around that medicine on the outside it's more it's an escape it's a treat it's more hospitable but beneath it it should still be the same thing it needs to serve the same purposes and attack the same stories just within a slightly different realm in order to keep up that same if it's not that then it's not journalism and and that's the key difference i would say and as we've talked about many of the issues are the same are they substance use labor law lots of different kinds of subjects emerge in sports journalism that also emerge in uh mainstream news and they need to be covered and so yes there's probably some it used to be called the toy department sports newsrooms but i don't think that necessarily applies when you're talking about real hard-hitting journalists in there and they are out there there's some outstanding features uh on uh brian gumbel's show for example real sports i've seen some excellent features on say exploitation of mount everest or what have you and so there there's good work out there the question is do people want to see it i believe the athletic has very lofty goals right but it's struggling financially isn't it so there's there's lots of great reporting out there but is it getting to people as much as some of the other other stories that maybe you're not as hard-hitting that's a great way to end thank you so much brian where can folks learn more about your work or connect with you they can go to the clemson university department of communication homepage and has a list of some of the projects i've been interested in great thank you matt where can we connect with you or learn more about what you're doing well i guess first off if you're in the midlands of south carolina you can tune in to watch fox channel 57 and watch me there i'm on tv most nights um beyond that find me on twitter at mattvarine i'm also on facebook instagram ticktalk if you search up my name you'll probably find me all right thank you very much matt and uh brian for this conversation next week we're going to be talking about sports accessibility oh that's going to be a fun conversation i'm really excited about that one too yeah me too brian and matt this has been just delightful um i have to say and i'm glad that we did a little deep dive into some of the backgrounds behind sports and sports journalism this was fascinating thank you so much we do want to ask you to leave us a review raido's apple podcast become a subscriber to the afterwardpodcast.com because it does help us keep the conversations going and as always remember you are welcome at our table [Music]