A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a story that was buzzing all over the web - with most of the focus being placed on the over-the-top reactions from Pulitzer prize winning author Buzz Bissinger in regards to a conversation about the pros and the cons of the blogosphere in relation to sports journalism. I focused the discussion on the role and value of comments made in response to blog posts, and today I’d like to follow-on by looking at two other interesting (and somewhat related) issues that emerged during the “debate”:

1. Journalist impartiality versus being transparently biased

2. Whether sports journalists have been doing their job

In regards to #1, Buzz took the position that once somebody dons that hat of being a journalist, they should immediately become impartial - reporting based on objective criteria only, free of all bias and prejudice in the stories and opinions they share. He was quite upset that on Deadspin, Will Leitch is loudly (and proudly) anything but objective - he is a fan of certain teams, and what he writes often reflects that perspective. Other popular sports writers and bloggers (notably The Sports Guy, as is evident in this recent piece, and Henry Abbott, author of the excellent True Hoops blog) have made similar arguments.

Writers and bloggers that take this perspective make a simple point - how does one pretend not to be a fan, and as Will said in the interview why did they get into sports in the first place? After all, there is a certain silliness to being a sports fan in general (see the “my local sports team is better than your local sports team” t-shirts), and the whole point of becoming engaged with sports is to cheer for a particular team that you have some (usually geographic) association with. Moreover, isn’t it better to be transparent about your bias so your readers know where you are coming from, rather than (say) pretending you can ignore having cheered for a particular team for 20 years?

It’s an interesting question that of course extends beyond sports - and I tend to agree with the Will Leitch’s of the world on this. I would rather read writers with certain biases that they are transparent about, than writers that generally just pretend to be totally impartial (and by extension generally try to keep whatever biases they have hidden from their readers). Everyone has opinions and certain biases, and I am certainly suspicious of those that pretend they don’t. Maybe it’s the mark of a big change in the world - where what some see as journalistic integrity others see as dishonesty.

But it’s the second issue that I find even more interesting. In the interview, the tactic host Bob Costas used most was reciting articles that various bloggers had written on Deadspin, and asking Will (founder of Deadspin) to defend the perspective. While this is silly in it’s own right, one article he chose was about “privileged sports writers”, which essentially presented the notion that sports journalists who owe their livelihood to inside access to professional athletes cannot write anything critical about them. The reason, of course, is simple - their access could easily be cut off. In turn, they are no longer objective.

Bob goes on to ask “isn’t this a false choice” - isn’t there room for responsible journalism, where well trained, insightful journalists can tell an amazing story from the “inside” that nobody else could tell by watching from a distance. I got to thinking that yes, there probably is room for that in theory - but I think that the original poster was correct in that sports journalists have seemed completely unwilling to tell negative stories (or alternatively are incompetent on a mass scale). Since the main sport of choice in the conversation was baseball, the steroid scandal is a case in point.

There are now mounds of evidence that steroids have been a major problem in baseball for quite some time. Anyone that knows anyone that has ever taken them, or even read a few stories about them, knows that it’s generally quite easy to tell if someone is on the juice - they get real big, real fast, and have often having other telling signs like ‘roid rages, acne, and all the rest. Over a period of a few short years a LOT of baseball players suddenly got a LOT bigger and stronger, and started hitting a LOT more balls over the fence, and some of them were at ages where one would expect their productivity to decline - yet they kept getting better. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots.

To their credit, a few sportswriters mentioned this here and there - but it was hardly widespread, and it sure seemed that a lot of writers were doing the same thing ballplayer Tony Gwynn said back in 1995 - “it’s like the big secret we’re not supposed to talk about.” It was a full ten years after that until Jose Canseco’s (a former player) “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big” came out and blew the lid off of the story.

Now wouldn’t one think that out of a bunch of well trained, responsible sports journalists with good observational skills, with near daily access to these athletes, should have broken this story wide open far, far earlier than it was? It kind of boggles the mind, and seems to speak to the point the blogger on Deadspin made - while I’m sure many journalists knew many of the players were on ‘roids, they wouldn’t dare come out and say it. If they didn’t know, or at least didn’t suspect enough to be digging around, one must question their competence and objectivity, which is what being a journalist is supposed to be all about.

As many players have said before (reported in places like this), there’s a “what goes on in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse” mentality in baseball. Most people also seem to believe the MLB itself was complicit in the whole thing, as the ‘roid rage era led to a smashing of home run records that is often credited with a resurgence in the popularity of baseball. But if what sets sports journalists apart from bloggers is their observational skills and objective reporting “from the inside”, it seems easy to make the case they utterly failed in this case - and other examples can easily be given (hello, SpyGate). In turn, perhaps those watching from the outside, who are not dependent on “insiders” for their livelihood in any way, are in a better position to report on what is actually going on… true neutrality trumping inside access.