Who to Blame

Over the past decade, any casual sports fan can tell you that there has been a drastic change in the way sports media operates. No longer do you mostly see descriptive narratives of games from the night before. Instead, every other page of the sports section will give headlines that make you think you picked up a copy of People. But whom should we blame for this culture change in sports media? Should we blame the media for constantly feeding us gossip? Or should we blame the fans for continuing to consume massive amounts of it? Needless to say, it’s a complex matter.

            Most people would say that today’s media is to blame for the gossip content spread throughout the sports world. The media is definitely the easiest scapegoat to look at. You have bloggers and analysts trying to one-up each other by monitoring social media sites such as Twitter all day. Eventually, anything an athlete or executive posts online is turned into a blog post or podcast about speculation on what the post could have meant. Often these interpretations are inaccurate and cause a big stir for no reason. Athletes have to constantly sensor themselves out of fear of what could end up on ESPN just an hour later.

            ESPN, while great and entertaining, sits at the center of this entire debate. The problem with a 24-hour sports network is eventually you will run out of fresh content, which is where rumors come in. From experience with covering sports for The Daily Reveille, I know how hard it can be to produce relevant story ideas on a regular basis. When you run out of ideas directly related to the sport itself, you have to turn to the personal lives of the athletes and coaches you are covering. In that sense, you can say that sports media is highly over saturated with content. ESPN is a perfect example of this oversaturation. The network constantly loops the same story over and over, so their sports contributors are forced to stalk athletes’ lives in search of a story worthy of making the news. However, sports networks can’t operate without fans.

            If the media is an engine, then fans are the fuel. It doesn’t matter what ESPN or Sports Illustrated uses as content, fans continue to consume sports media at an excessive rate. Even savvy sports consumers such as myself are guilty of watching and reading content that has more to do with gossip than the actual logistics of the game. It’s just the nature of a fan to want every bit of information available about their favorite teams and players. We want to know if Jordan Jefferson is staying out of trouble or if Tyrann Mathieu is hanging out with local rappers. Just as sports writers do, fans stay glued to social media sites to see what an athlete has to say. If the athlete posts something vague or unclear, the cycle of rumors begins again which is where many people will turn to ESPN and other sports news sites. When media figures are asked questions about their opinions on those matters, many fans accept these opinions or theories as fact. That is where a different subject of debate in the lack of media literacy comes in to play, and simply put, the vast majority of sports fans are media illiterate.

            In the end, if I am forced to point the figure at who or what has caused the gossip culture in sports media, I point my finger at the Internet. The Internet has made everything in the sports world global and immediate. Fans can now follow a game in real-time on the Internet, eliminating the need for game recaps in the newspaper. To fill that void, we end up with information about what players did following the game or other storylines irrelevant to the game. The emergence of social media has recreated sports media as we know it. Players can now cut out the middleman and communicate directly with the fans. Rumors are created on Twitter faster before an event is even finished. Players can go on controversial rants, supplying the media with all the content they need to fill hour-long blocks of television and pages of content in the newspaper. The Internet has bridged the gap between media and fans created endless options on who to blame for the excessive gossip in sports media. The content will likely never change, but the responsibility lies on the consumers to decide what to tolerate and at what rate to consume the content at. Consumers have to become savvy enough to figure out what Internet outlets to believe and to decide what is relevant to them as a sports fan.