San Francisco Chronicle refuses to cover MMA and UFC and UFC President bashes em

Legally, a paper can choose to not acknowledge the Super Bowl if it so desires. But you ignore major sporting events in your own community at your own peril if you intend to be an all-purpose newsgathering organization.

You're also implying that there's no news value for non-MMA fans, which seems unlikely; there's almost certainly a significant pool of people who have little or no knowledge of MMA who would read a primer about what it is and why it being in the community for this one show is a big deal -- and it certainly is, regardless of your feelings about the sport itself.

And your "nine-tenths of MMA fans will see everything somewhere else anyway" can be applied to almost everything sports sections cover nowadays.

 

C'mon guys...blood on the canvas doesn't define danger. Boxing's more dangerous, because the damage is slow, because you fight many more times, because the head is a punching bag for years and years and who in the world is that good for?

MMA almost invariably turns into two crabs crawling around on the floor with low-to-moderate boxing skills. So you break some guy's nose or create a cut. That's not going to kill anybody. 160 shots to the gut, over 45 minutes, kills people.

 

Why, precisely, is a young sport with a limited, albeit passionate fan base a big deal that absolutely has to be covered?

 

MMA - or at least the MMA sold by UFC - is a very popular television show.

As a sport, however, who knows how popular it is?

And since Dana White seems to be the only official "sanctioning" body for "championships," it's pretty hard to take these "title" fights seriously.

 

A major pay-per-view event that sells out an NBA arena in your backyard and starts at 7 pm, and you can't even give it 12 inches in tomorrow's paper? What a joke.

 

Attendance: 12,971
Gate: $1.56 million

That's why. And it has nothing to do with how you view MMA. There's no way a sporting event in your coverage area, broadcast internationally on PPV, and drawing 13,000 fans and $1.5 million on a summer night is ignored by an all-purpose newsgathering organization.

 

What is that 12-inch story going to do for anyone? To the people who are craving MMA, it's zilch. To the people who don't crave MMA, it's zilch because they skip right over it. This whole argument is stuck in the old world of what coverage an event "deserves" and doing something because it's "right," regardless of whether it will benefit any of your actual readers and thereby strengthen your product.

 

Kid/Meat: an Osteen service or a rummage sale would do likewise. So what? And "major pay-per-view" event? In that demimonde maybe (tho with it being up to 117 or something like that, don't know how special any one is anymore).

 

If Joel Osteen made a stop in that arena, it would be covered. If there was a rummage sale that large, it would be covered. And its being a PPV event acknowledges that it's a significant show -- just like in boxing or pro wrestling.

You're confusing your distaste for the sport with its newsworthiness. Again, no other sporting event that draws 13,000 people is getting ignored by a major newsgathering organization.

 

No, neither would be, more than likely. And if so, wouldn't be covered like an event, but as a feature/crowd piece. I don't think MMA would want the Chronicle to run the type of story they would most likely run on it. And if you editorially don't think MMA is a major sport, you treat it the same as you treat WWE: not at all.

 

Maybe the paper doesn't think it's legit. Plenty of people don't. They treat it like pro wrestling - perception that can be laid off on Dana White.

 

And if they do see it as WWE, then surely it's an A1 entertainment event.

Listen, I'm not a big fan of MMA either but I cover it here when it happens because there's a percentage of my readership that follows it. I don't think auto racing is any more of a sport but it gets coverage too.