18 January 2010
Looking for the Line

Filed under news + sport

For one long, terrific year, I was a page editor at the UH-Hilo newspaper, something I bring up in conversation a lot more than one might expect for having served only a year. My editor-in-chief was Ryan, who remains a great friend, and our business manager was Jen, and there was a crazy mixture of others, some from the literary magazine whose office was next door, some from the UH-Hilo Student Association office, and the rest from who knows where. And it was fifteen years ago this week that we leapt into what would be our last semester together in Hilo, ‘though some of us lingered a while longer.

It was a weekly paper and it could have been utter bush league stuff, but with Ryan at the helm and a group of silly idealists stroking the oars, we did our best to maintain journalistic standards in reporting the news, “such as it exists on this campus,” I once wrote in a column. Ryan, never one to do anything halfway, even had the paper sponsor a school dance (very poorly attended) just because he hated the music that the deejays spun at the other school dances, and printed up beautiful black t-shirts with white lettering quoting the First Amendment.

Together, we did our best to keep news on the front page and editorial content several pages back. We resisted pressure from other Campus Center offices to print bogus news stories designed to hype events. We got into shouting matches with members of registered student organizations over why their features weren’t on the front page. We took flak for misprinting a student’s name when we ran the Honor Roll—the offended party wanted us to reprint the entire list with the corrected spelling. For the most part, though, news being such as it was on that campus, it was harder to come up with something worthy of the front page than it was to decide, most weeks, whether something was appropriate or not.

Ryan was pretty excited about new signs once. Desi, our photographer, wasn’t around and Ryan really wanted to get photos of the new signs. “How the heck are new signs news?” I asked. He didn’t have time to explain. I found out later that there was some question about where the very nice signs had come from and who had paid for them. In a year when one student organization ran a toilet-paper drive at Campus Center as a way to call attention to the school’s budget woes, that could have been real news. It turned out that the signs were made by inmates at the county prison, so it wasn’t as juicy a news item as it could have been, but for a moment we were pretty juiced.

I retell this because I’ve been thinking lately (yes, six months after the story first broke) about the Ben Roethlisberger case. It is true that I only took introductory journalism courses in college and that Ke Kalahea was a super-small-time operation, but I think I learned enough while arguing over corn-chowder-filled bread-bowls at lunch about what our task as a campus paper was that I have something meaningful to say about this.

Roethlisberger, the all-star quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, was accused last July in a civil case of raping a woman in Nevada. If you get your sports news primarily from ESPN, which I do, you didn’t hear a thing about it until the Wednesday after the weekend during which the story came out. ESPN was largely taken to task for what many pundits considered protecting one of the NFL’s biggest stars. There were accusations that if Roethlisberger had been black (he’s white), ESPN would have been all over it. ESPN claimed that as a general policy, it does not report civil suits, which can be brought by anyone against anybody for just about anything. Unlike the Mike Tyson and Kobe Bryant cases, which involved the police and actual trials, the Roethlisberger situation was little more than one woman’s accusation against someone who hadn’t yet responded to the accusations. ESPN said that it was waiting to get responses from Roethlisberger.

When an athlete of the stature of Roethlisberger is accused of something, is it news? Of course it is. The accusation itself is news, but the question about what a responsible news agency should do with that news doesn’t seem as clear. Kevin Blackistone, a journalist I admire very much, wrote that ESPN erred mightily in its judgment. Blackistone wrote that ESPN had a responsibility to report the details as they developed, including the news that Las Vegas police were not opening a criminal investigation.

Dan LeBatard, another journalist I have great respect for, wrote that ESPN exercised an appropriate and admirable restraint in waiting to secure facts before chumming the gossipy waters with hearsay. LeBatard went so far as to say ESPN caved when it finally did report the story on that Wednesday, because by then EVERYBODY was reporting it. But he adds:

We want our gossip, even if it is not true, and our need for it makes TMZ and smut rags grow while books and newspapers and literary magazines die. It is one of the many ways America keeps getting dumber by the day. And, in this climate, it makes the high ground an awfully difficult place to be.

That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? I agree with Blackistone that something like this is news. But no organization, not even the Worldwide Leader in Sports, has the resources to cover everything, and even if it did, would it have the responsibility to cover everything? Let’s keep in mind that what constitutes news in the sports world is not the same thing that makes news in the real world. Which was this? ESPN has a long-running program called Outside the Lines, an outstanding Nightline-type of investigative reporting program that covers the kinds of stories sports fans might sometimes prefer not to know about. It is a noble effort, this program, and it has pointed the finger of accusation at itself about as often as any news organization can. Was this Roethlisberger civil case, absent any police involvement or response from Roethlisberger, the kind of thing Outside the Lines would cover?

Good journalism when it comes to sports news is kind of different from good journalism in the rest of the world. Sportswriters are burdened with having to report the news, but bias is completely welcome in some cases (as on the front pages of sports sections in towns with home teams) and completely not accepted in others (as when ESPN reporters are broadcasting a game and discouraged from predicting the winners). This means it’s a lot easier to consider the public’s right to know, the public’s need to know, and the agency’s desire to cater to either.

Is anyone done a disservice if the Roethlisberger story is not reported until facts can be checked and quotes can be gathered? I have to agree with LeBatard and say no. In this age where bloggers with absolutely no accountability are unshackled by journalistic integrity, how are real news agencies going to distinguish themselves? By getting the story right. It saddens me that this kind of accuracy is perhaps the kind of thing that will kill traditional media. The only outcry following the Balloon Boy debacle, for example, seemed to come only from columnists in print newspapers. We were all taken for a ride and it was television news agencies that carried us on that lousy journey. The tendency to report supposition and speculation in the absence of facts (which can always be reported once they are obtained) keeps viewers glued to sets, but where news agencies used to pride themselves in accuracy, “accurate as far as we know” is now good enough.

If we don’t want to be jerked around by the likes of Balloon Boy’s father, we’ve got to demand more from our sources and we have to stop rewarding TMZ (which announced last month that it plans to launch TMZ Sports) and its ilk, or we’re going to end up getting what we deserve and not what we want or need. Once the high ground is obliterated, will any of us remember what it looked like?

2010-01-18  ::  me