Bleacher Report ran a story today on the prospects of Michael Sam hooking on with an NFL franchise. The story was interesting for a number of reasons — for questioning what he calls the simple bigotry narrative, for raising the specter of teams being unwilling to take a flier on such a high-profile but apparently middle- to low-ceiling player. But what I found most intriguing in the piece was not the discussion of Sam. It was Michael Tanier’s comments about the media’s relationship with the NFL — and, I would assume, major sports’ relationship with the press, as well.
Here is Tanier:
Deitsch pointed out just how much control NFL teams have over media access: Credential and interview requests can simply be turned down or revoked if reporters/photographers/videographers don’t follow the rules set down by the league and team. Like Zeigler, Deitsch maintains that Sam coverage has been relatively restrained since the brief over-boil of last year’s draft.
Later, he makes a similar point:
Individual teams have well-established relationships with the local newspapers and radio stations, as well as national entities like ESPN and Bleacher Report.If I show up at training camp and ask questions that might stoke a quarterback controversy, that’s part of the game. But if I ask inappropriate, obtrusive questions, a team can revoke my credential, call my editor or contact the NFL media to have me blacklisted from events like the draft and Super Bowl.I could easily lose my job for stepping too far outside the lines. That’s a power teams do not wield over, say, a celebrity reporter who could raise a ruckus, leave his/her press pass at the door and cover Taylor Swift the next day.
Basically, what he is saying is that there is a very narrow window within which regular beat reporters are allowed to operate and, should you step outside the window, you will be shunted off to the sports world version of Siberia (forget that covering Taylor Swift might get you a raise). That he makes these statements so matter-of-factly probably should be disturbing. After all, we want to believe that reporters are independent observers operating at an arms length from the people they cover.
If only this was true. Every reporter lives in some fear of burning a source — whether we are talking about someone covering the Jets or the White House. This is most obvious in the sports world , of course, where writers have always engaged in a Faustian bargain of trading their soul (independence) for access to places off limits to the regular fan and for free tickets to the games.
We accept this within the sports world, but pretend otherwise when it comes to hard news. The New York Times would never hold a scoop at the request of the White House and war reporters embedded with combat troops would never clear their stories through the Defense Department. Except, they do this all the time.
I fear that this attitude has become so ingrained that I am now seeing it in my journalism students. I quiz them early in the semester on their news judgment and basic ethical framework. One of the questions I ask is this:
You are contacted by a retired police officer alleging corruption within the local police department. He will not give you his name, but gives you specific information about nepotism in the promotion process.
Could this story effect your relationship with the police department if it captures them in a negative light? Will they no longer come to you with information?
I’m not surprised by the answer. About a third of the students have offered some variation of this each year I pose the question, and it is consistent with qualms raised by reporters who have worked for me over the years.
My response always is the same (or that is what my memory tells me): If the information is true and important, you have no choice but to run with the story. You may have no choice but to anger the police — or the school board, or mayor, or council, or governor, etc. — and you just have to deal with the consequences afterward. Easier said than done, but I’d like to think that I followed this rule for the most part during my long stretch as reporter and editor for the South Brunswick (Central) Post and The Cranbury Press (and now when dealing with state officials for stories for NJ Spotlight). I wasn’t perfect — who is? But what allowed my papers to continue doing the kind of work I wanted to do was three things: We were seen as fair (we ran both positive and negatives stories as the circumstances warranted), we were consistent, and we were above board. If this sounds like I’m patting myself on the back, then that’s what it probably is. I’m not alone, though, in doing my best to operate in this manner. Most editors and reporters make every attempt to do the same and most are at least as successful doing so as I am.
The access trade-off is a long-standing fact of the business, and we should be open about these kinds of unspoken deals. What concerns me is not that this happens in some areas of the news business, but that it is growing to become the dominant model as the subjects of our stories become more media savvy, as they become more comfortable with public relations models and the press has less and less direct access to decision-makers and has to rely more and more on press releases and stage-managed events. It is getting harder and harder to function independently, and that should have everyone — not just reporters — concerned.
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Hank Kalet 