Sports Reporters (MSM) and the SPJ Code of Ethics

I should preface this by saying that my chosen profession is journalism. I am not currently, never was, and never will be a sports journalist. They are a different breed entirely.

As a journalist, your excepts from the SPJ code caught my eye. Yes, they are in fact taught from the day you decide major in journalism. These are very serious guidelines and journalists strive everyday to meet them. Spend a day with a real journalist and you will find that they constantly look to these guidelines to help in their reporting. A majority of the time it’s not black and white. There are tough calls to be made and SPJ created this code to help in these decisions. At first, I felt a little offended by your apparent mocking of something that I strive to follow, but took time to let it digest instead of posting some vitriolic statement right away. I appreciate your research and it does make for a good argument.

As you point out, these are guidelines and SPJ is an organization, but not a governing body. Journalists can choose to follow them or not. It is not the fault of an entire industry (labeled MSM in your post) if one doesn’t.

It should also be pointed out that this code of ethics applies most specifically to reporting. You point out many names. Jaime Dukes, Woody Paige, Mike Klis, and others. All of them are not journalists in my opinion. They are commentators. They write opinion and commentary. As it says under Seek Truth and Report It, “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting…Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresented as fact or context”. It should be understood that when something is labeled as commentary, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Commentators take far to many liberties with this nowadays, but nonetheless if it is labeled as commentary/opinion I find it hard to fault them under the code. If they report their opinion as fact, then it’s a problem.

But most people don’t distinguish between a real report and a commentary. This can be very dangerous as evidenced by large issues like health care, but let’s not get into that. Another time, another place. This is all the more reason for commentators to look to the COE for guidence, but it’s tough. When many of the best journalists are losing their jobs, it’s easy to fall into a habit of writing whatever will draw the most eyes instead of writing the best you can.

Sports journalism is very susceptible to this because they are writing about an industry that also needs to draw the eyes of millions to sustain itself.

Jaime Dukes gets a lot of your ire. So I find it interesting that you left out the “Act Independently” section of the COE. Dukes works for a network run by the company that it reports on. The job NFLN does is commendable considering the extreme conflict of interest, but people should still be warned of what is reported on NFLN. Dukes is just another cog in the money machine of the NFL. He is not a reporter. He is an entertainment personality and probably has never seen the COE and I’m not sure if he needs to. It’s not his job to report. It’s his job to get millions of eyeballs to watch him so his boss can sell those eyeballs to Under Armor and Gatorade.

Great journalists who followed this COE to the T lost their jobs. It wasn’t because they were bad at their job or because they were causing harm and people stopped reading, it was because of bad business decisions (i.e. let’s give our product away for free to everyone and figure out how to make money later) that they didn’t have any control over.

To wrap up:
1) I appreciate that you looked deeper into journalism and reminded folks about what a journalist should do.

2) There is a difference between reporting and opinion; journalists and commentators

3) This code is used a great deal in real reporting, but entertainers (even bad ones like Dukes) can’t be expected to uphold it, even if it would do them good.

As a former journalist, I guess I see the issue a bit differently than most folks here. My complaint about the press is that they work so hard to avoid the perception of certain kinds of bias, that they abdicate the duty to test the informaiton they have. To know something and report something actual. And thus the plague (documented magnificently by the Columbia Journalism Review) of reporting every issue as a standard conflict between two sides.

Most of my examples are political, so I will avoid them here. Let’s stick with Pork Chop. For God’s sake man, do you know anything about football? The guy is so afraid to look like he’s playing favorites, he refuses to use any of the knowledge he possess about the game. Hey, Bill, is such-and-such a good player? Yeah, sure, he can contribute. A huge part of the journalist’s duty is to be an expert on a subject. Burying that expertise in the service of a misplaced notion of fairness is, to my mind, a terrible (and sneaky!) violation of the code of ethics. If you know something reaks, or that somebody’s failing, and you write a piece saying “there’s controverysey,” you’ve abdicated your duty no less than Jamie Dukes does every hour.