Dear dimwit on the phone

False equivalence is false.

 

If you wanted to be that kind of reporter, stay out of meaningless entertainment beats like sports. You lose that macho duty to inform credibility when you are covering prep football instead of a school board meeting.

 

To expound, I find it completely self-deluding to insist that we have to follow some sort of idealized standard of what a reporter should be, because we're reporters and have a duty to inform.

There's nothing to be ashamed of in it, but the simple fact of the matter is that sports are fluff that pays the bills. We are not fulfilling the the societal duty to keep the public informed of issues of relevance to their lives. We are in the business of producing content people will be entertained by in exchange for their attention to advertising or subscription fees.

We are much more closely related to the comics page, celebrity pulp magazines and free porn sites than we are to the Platonic ideal of a reporter that you learned about in Journalism And Democracy 101.

And that's OK. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that. But we don't have to pretend that we're something that we're not and follow a bunch of meaningless rules just so that we can feel like we're big-kid reporters.

 

I go into this with the simple logic that me writing that a kid missed a kick or a game winning kick or whatnot isn't really piling on. The kid knows it happened. Many of the people he'd feel bad about letting down know what happened. I guess I've never seen how writing that johnny was the one who lost a fumble is that great an offense. Now I won't say little Johnny fuckup lost the game or rip on the kid, but I'll explain his part in the flow of the game.

I usually even talk to a teary-eyed kid who just saw his career end or missed a crucial penalty kick. I always use kid gloves and inform the kid if they're too upset to answer a question, that's OK, but I often do that to capture the emotion of the event,

 

This discussion has kind of morphed into something else that's still an interesting discussion, but the original issue, IIRC, was that he didn't want to include a quote from *the opposing coach* about the kid being classless.

 

It for sure spawned an interesting topic, but yes, it was originally about a kid being called classless by an opposing coach. That coach, BTW, is not the least bit sorry for the comment even if he has to write a letter of mea culpa to the mom.

 

Lots of calls today to my desk, but no real dimwits.

Nice old lady wanted to know where Notre Dame was located. I didn't need the Googles for that one.

 

An old lady called wanting to know what number a sports channel was on, and if I didn't know, she wanted me to give her the number of her cable provider.

 

Repeat after me: guide button!

 

Exactly. There is a HUGE difference between intentionally trying to embarrass someone and simply telling the story. Do we not see that?

 

Notre Dame is located in California. We had one prep athlete go on to play there.

 

Do you actually follow up on those police reports when they go to court?