The Baseball Test

Brad DeLong is a fan:

A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the notion of demanding greater expertise from reporters - even if it would mean putting the folks at Get Religion out of work - but alas, applying the baseball test might not carry us quite so far as one might think. The sports blogosphere may be slightly ahead of the political blogosphere in providing alternatives to lousy, lazy MSM reporting and commentary, but overall the pattern in both realms is similar - scads of bad professional journalists, and hordes of bloggers who love to ask, DeLong-style, "why oh why can't we have better baseball writers?"

Alex Massie has the gory details.

Comments

ten years ago, when it was becoming ridiculously obvious to everyone that baseball players were becoming absurdly muscular and that steroid use HAD to be widespread, did you see many articles about that in the sports pages? Did anybody stop to ask whether Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had done anything improper?

I sure didn't see it. I saw a lot of fawning reporters eager to ingratiate themselves with Mac and Sammy.

So, it's not at all clear to me that baseball writers are qualified to be role models for political reporters.

Posted by astorian | August 15, 2007 12:50 PM

Great example here today:

http://antiprotester.blogspot.com/2007/08/propaganda-of-week.html

You'd think people working in war zones would know the difference between fired and and unfired small arms rounds.

Posted by Campesino | August 15, 2007 4:46 PM

"ten years ago, when it was becoming ridiculously obvious to everyone that baseball players were becoming absurdly muscular and that steroid use HAD to be widespread, did you see many articles about that in the sports pages?"

Not much. Tom Boswell of the Washington Post publicly accused Jose Canseco of steroid use way back in 1988, and Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about it in the 1990s, but they were exceptions. I wrote about steroids in National Review in 1997:

http://www.isteve.com/gendrgap.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 15, 2007 8:05 PM

Back in my early-teens when I was starting to follow baseball religiously, I began to realise that baseball writers and the other so-called "baseball experts" that I looked up to weren't as knowledgeable as I had been giving them credit for being. As time went on, I noticed that applied to journalists in other fields as well. As a result, today there are relatively few journalists I have a lot of respect for.

Based on my experience following the main stream media and having several E-Mail exchanges with various members of the MSM, I have come to the following two conclusions:

1) The vast majority of journalists do not know more about their area of focus than the average person who follows that particular subject.
2) The vast majority of journalists, despite point 1), consider themselves experts on the subject they cover.

Posted by R. A. | August 15, 2007 9:42 PM

I used the steroid issue earlier ebcause it was the most glaring example I could think of where sportswriters failed to report on huge stories that were right under their noses. But there are countless other examples.

I grew up in New York City and often heard complaints about the "tough" New York media. In reality, the New York sports media were softies! We now know that the 1986 Mets were (with the exception of Gary Carter) the scummiest bunch of human beings ever assembled on one major league roster- but none of the New York papers ever revealed what was going on until a decade later. Maybe the beat writers simply didn't see what was going on right in front of them. Or maybe they knew what was going on but didn't want to alienate players by revealing it. Either way, it doesn't speak well of them.

Then there's the interesting case of Kirby Puckettt. I lost track of how many times I heard journalists praise Puckett to the heavens, holding him up as a role model for the ages, as the saintliest human being in sports. In reality, Puckett was nothing of the kind. He was an utter turd off the field! How did sportswriters get this story so wrong? There are several possibilities, and none of them reflect well on the journalists:

a) Reporters didn't know anything about Kirby Puckett's life or activities, but portrayed him as a saint because.. gosh, all their colleagues said Kirby was a swell guy, so it HAD to be true!

b) Reporters didn't know anything about Puckett, but portrayed him as a saint because he always had a smile and a quote for them, and really, isn't THAT what counts most?

c) Reporters knew Kirby was a lecher, but hey, boys will be boys, right?

d) Reporters knew Pucket was a louse, but if they said so in print, none of the players would ever talk to them again... so it was easier to parrot the Conventional Wisdom that Kirby was a saint.

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None of this makes baseball writers evil or stupid. It just makes them typical journalists. Whether you're covering sports, politics, the arts, restaurants or anything else, it's very easy to fall into the same traps:

You develop a group of sources and get too comfortable relying on them.

You sit on hot stories because you don't want to alienate sources.

You fall into a kind of Groupthink, and start regurgitating what all your colleagues are saying and thinking, even if you're not sure they're right.

You start to judge the important people on your beat NOT by how good a job they do but by how nicely they treat you.

*

In all these ways, sportswriters are just like their brethren on the political beat. No better, no worse. They make the same mistakes for many of the same reasons.

Posted by astorian | August 16, 2007 10:54 AM