Sports News and Censorship

DEFINITION: News media coverage of amateur and professional sports

SIGNIFICANCE: Despite the fact that sports news has traditionally been regarded less significant than other forms of news, sports journalists have faced at least as much censorship as other journalists

Los Angeles Times sports editor Bill Dwyre once described the sports department as the unwanted child of the newsroom, shunted into a corner so that it does not contaminate the true journalists. Perhaps as a result of such segregation, sports journalists have developed writing styles that differ significantly from other kinds of newswriting. This segregation may also have contributed to significant differences in how sports journalists perceive their roles and responsibilities.

Most censorship in sports journalism has been practiced by sports organizations or sports journalists themselves. Government censorship of sports journalism has rarely occurred in the United States, although this is not the case in other countries; for example, Steve Menary, in his report on the Danish Institute for Sports Studies’ 2017 Play the Game conference, cited a presentation by Cuban lawyer and blogger Eloy Viera Cañive on restrictions faced by sports writers in Cuba as a condition of government support for sports. These restrictions have caused significant legal problems—including charges of illegal distribution—for the non-state-controlled Cuban sports magazine Play-Off, which, according to Menary, “writes about the careers of athletes who have fled the socialist regime.” Such athletes, Viera Cañive reported, “have been despised and forgotten in the media.”

In contrast, the US government has generally been more concerned with protecting the broadcast rights of networks that have contracted to show sporting events. The government did censor films of African American boxing champion Jack Johnson’s defeat of James J. Jeffries, the so-called Great White Hope, in 1912, but journalists still covered the event and reported on the outcome. Sports journalists have also faced censorship from powerful organizations such as teams and leagues, mainly in the form of pressure to keep newsworthy stories from the public.

Self-Censorship

Self-censorship has long haunted sports journalists. In the nineteenth century, Henry Chadwick, considered the father of American sportswriting, not only coined common terms for baseball plays but also worked closely with the game’s leaders to advance the sport. Chadwick’s coverage was designed to popularize the sport and it may have led to a symbiosis between sports journalists and sports promoters. In his stinging critique The Jocks (1969), sportswriter Leonard Shecter painted some of his modern colleagues as overgrown sports fans who would cover up a sports organization’s flaws for “a set of glasses with the team logo.”

Certainly in the 1920s, sometimes called the Golden Age of Sports, many sportswriters were willing to cover up negative news about the sports stars of the day. Writers who followed baseball hero Babe Ruth, for example, were allowed to accompany him on tours in eschange for keeping silent about his paternity suits, heavy drinking, and other problems. In No Cheering in the Press Box (1974), Jerome Holtzman’s oral history of sportswriters, several writers boast of helping Ruth and others avoid bad publicity. Richards Vidmer, for example, claimed, “I could have written a story every day on the Babe. But I never wrote about his personal life, not if it would hurt him.” Vidmer also boasted of keeping the news that baseball player Lou Gehrig was suffering from a fatal disease from his audience. He argued that the public had no right to know about the disease; it had only the right to know whether Gehrig would play or not.

Sports journalism, for the most part, eventually outgrew Vidmer’s brand of self-censorship, but reporters have continued to face the self-censorship question in dealing with athletes, coaches, and other sports officials who all have methods of intimidation that can be used against sports journalists.

The Locker Room

Coaches and athletic team administrators have some power to influence news content through their dealings with the managements of news organizations. The most common form of censorship coaches use is the threat of limiting access to sources. The threat is clear for many sports journalists: print or broadcast something negative and get frozen out of the news loop. Though this practice may not fall as blatantly under the censorship banner as prior restraint, it nevertheless has a chilling effect on open reporting.

In 1995 Tom Osborne, coach of the University of Nebraska’s powerhouse football program, barred two reporters representing the university’s student paper from attending practices or entering the team’s locker room because the paper had printed editorial cartoons critical of Osborne and his athletes. Osborne later rescinded the ban but said he would decline interviews with the student reporters and enforce stricter rules for all reporters. Osborne’s philosophy is not strikingly different from that of other coaches. He claimed that attending team practices was “a privilege and not a right.” Open access to locker rooms and practice sessions is vital to reporters’ access to their sources.

Limited access to men’s locker rooms and practices has been a thorny issue for women sports journalists. Women watched male reporters walk into locker rooms during the 1977 World Series while an order from baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn kept them out. After reporter Melissa Luedtke filed suit, federal courts ruled that women journalists had the same right to access as male reporters. However, tradition did not wither easily under the court order. Particularly in collegiate sports, some athletic directors and coaches continued to bar women from male athletes’ locker rooms. In 1988, for example, reporter Karen Rosen was told by Vanderbilt University’s athletic director, “We don’t let girls in our locker room. We never have and we never will.” Once admitted to the locker room, women sports journalists have, at times, faced harassment from athletes and coaches. Reporter Susan Fornoff, for example, once received a gift-wrapped dead rat from a baseball player.

Male reporters have also often received harassment in locker rooms. All reporters run the risk of receiving the silent treatment; in 1985, for example, Seattle columnist Steve Kelley criticized a Seattle Mariners baseball player and found the entire team refused to participate in interviews with him. Players can also use physical intimidation to punish reporters for stories that they deem negative. In 1979, after reporter Dale Robertson wrote that quarterback Dan Pastorini appeared to have problems throwing the football, he had a locker room altercation with Pastorini—who later admitted that he did, in fact, have a shoulder injury.

In 1994, after CBS golf announcer Gary McCord remarked that the greens at the Masters golf tournament were slick like “bikini wax,” he tournament’s directors demanded that CBS remove him from its telecast or they would entertain bids from other networks for the rights to the telecast. CBS complied. Examples such as these and many others have repeatedly shown that sports reporters must often censor their own stories in order to do their jobs.

Sports Writing in the Twenty-First Century

The advent of social-media platforms such as Twitter has disrupted the traditional media framework in which journalists and editors serve as gatekeepers for public access to information, and sports media is no exception. In addition to enabling athletes to engage directly with the public, without sports journalists to serve as intermediaries, this new dynamic also allows journalists to express themselves more freely without editorial intervention. Media scholars Lee Hall, Neil Farrington, and John Price have noted that Twitter in particular is “a no-man’s-land where employers, be they football clubs or newspaper groups, seem reluctant to infringe on the liberty of their employees to air their opinions in their own time.” While this does not translate to a complete hands-off policy by employers, it has raised questions about where employers choose to—and are entitled to—draw the line.

One example of this phenomenon came in September 2017, when, in reaction to comments by President Donald Trump on white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the previous month, Jemele Hill, then a cohost of the ESPN program SportsCenter, posted on Twitter that Trump “is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] other white supremacists.” Despite the White House calling for Hill to be fired for the remark, ESPN did not take punitive action against her, although the network did release a statement saying, “Jemele has a right to her personal opinions, but not to publicly share them on a platform that implies that she was in any way speaking on behalf of ESPN. She has acknowledged that her tweets crossed that line and has apologized for doing so. We accept her apology.” The following month, Hill again drew national attention on Twitter when she suggested that Dallas Cowboys fans who objected to statements by team owner Jerry Jones could boycott the Cowboys’ advertisers. As a result of the comment, she received a two-week suspension from SC6 for what ESPN called “a second violation” of the network’s media policy. Hill later explained, “My employer is in business with the [National Football League], and some of those same advertisers that Jerry Jones has, they’re also advertisers of ESPN. So I very much understood why I was suspended. It was not related to the Trump tweets, it was more or less related to that and putting the company in a tough position.” The network took no action against Hill beyond the suspension, and she later chose to leave SportsCenter to work as a writer for the ESPN-owned website The Undefeated, citing the greater commentary opportunities available to columnists as compared to anchors.

Continued Censorship

In 2024, two high-profile cases of censorship were committed against sports journalists. The reasons behind these moves appeared to be that the athletes and organizations promoting the censorship were wary of bad press for their own questionable conduct. In August 2024, the University of Colorado prohibited Denver Press sportswriter Dean Keeler from asking questions from head coach Deion Sanders. Sanders, with a decades-long history of seeking the media spotlight, had apparently become offended at much of Keeler's questioning and commentary. In supporting Sanders, the University of Colorado described Keeler as conducting personal attacks on Sanders. Others maintained that Sanders promoted media attention but would only tolerate reporting that was favorable.  

In 2024, rookie phenom Caitlin Clark entered the Women’s National Basketball Association (WBNA) after a standout collegiate career at the University of Iowa. Her superlative performance continued into the WNBA as she set rookie scoring records and immediately became one of its most high-profile players. Many alleged that the immediacy of Clark’s rise to WNBA stardom did not sit well with veteran players, many of whom had to grind out many years of stellar play and had not reached the media spotlight accorded to Clark. Others maintained that Clark’s talent generated positive fan support and that she was being victimized by league mates. Clark, for instance, was not selected for the US women's basketball team for the 2024 Summer Olympic games, reportedly at the insistence of veteran WNBA players.

In a September 2024 WNBA game, Clark was subjected to a hard foul by opponent DiJonai Carrington which resulted in Clark developing a black eye. Clark biographer Christine Brennan of USA Today later questioned Carrington about the foul and Clark’s injury. Carrington took exception to Brennan’s questioning and complained to the WNBA Players Association (WNBAPA) union. The WNBAPA called for USA Today to investigate Brennan’s journalistic ethics, which could be construed as an attempt to either suppress Brennan or ensure more favorable reporting. USA Today stood behind Brennan and refused to take such actions.  

Bibliography

Bieler, Des. “ESPN’s Jemele Hill Says She Stands by ‘White Supremacist’ Description of Trump.” The Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/02/21/espns-jemele-hill-says-she-stands-by-white-supremacist-description-of-trump. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Billings, Andrew C., editor. Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption. Routledge, 2011.

Cancian, Dan. "What Did Mike Tyson and Robin Givens Say in Barbara Walters Interview?" Newsweek, 25 May 2021, www.newsweek.com/mike-tyson-robin-givens-barbara-walters-interview-1594178. Accessed 4 Oct 2024.

Hall, Lee, et al. “Twitter, Disintermediation and the Changing Role of the Sports Journalist.” Br(e)aking the News: Journalism, Politics and New Media, edited by Janey Gordon et al., Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 165–79.

Holtzman, Jerome, editor. No Cheering in the Press Box. Rev. ed., Henry Holt, 1995.

Irving, Kyle. "Colorado Bans Reporter from Asking Questions to Deion Sanders: Why Coach Prime Took Issue with Denver Post Writer." The Sporting News, 23 Aug. 2024, www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/colorado-bans-reporter-deion-sanders-coach-prime-denver-post/c06961af5f4acac2407a0dca. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Koppett, Leonard. Sports Illusion, Sports Reality: A Reporter’s View of Sports, Journalism, and Society. 1981. University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Lipsyte, Robert. “Probing the Gray Areas of ESPN’s Journalism.” Public Editor, ESPN, 3 Dec. 2014, www.espn.com/blog/ombudsman/post/‗/id/477/probing-the-gray-areas-of-espns-journalism. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Lipsyte, Robert. Sportsworld: An American Dreamland. New York, Quadrangle, 1975.

Menary, Steve. “Dangers of Sports Journalism.” Play the Game, Danish Institute for Sports Studies, 29 Nov. 2017, www.playthegame.org/news/news-articles/2017/0410‗dangers-of-sports-journalism. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Perebinossoff, Philippe. Real-World Media Ethics: Inside the Broadcast and Entertainment Industries. 2nd ed., New York, Routledge, 2017.

Rotondi, Jessica Pearce. "How Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio Became the Ultimate Power Couple." History.com, 12 Feb. 2024, www.history.com/news/marilyn-monroe-joe-dimaggio-marriage-icons. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Shecter, Leonard. The Jocks. Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.

Suggs, David. "WNBPA Picks a Fight with USA Today’s Christine Brennan over Caitlin Clark vs. DiJonai Carrington Coverage." The Sporting News, 27 Sept. 2024, www.sportingnews.com/us/wnba/news/wnbpa-usa-today-christine-brennan-caitlin-clark-dijonai-carrington/95ca66a6902c384237480397. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Wenner, Lawrence A., editor. Media, Sports, & Society. Sage Publications, 1989.

Wojciechowski, Gene. Pond Scum and Vultures: America’s Sportswriters Talk about Their Glamorous Profession. Macmillan, 1990.