Lies, Damned Lies and Sports Journalism

From the Associated Press:

Headline: Favre Now Says He Will Play If Healthy

Mankato, Minnn -- Brett Favre's flip-flopping is at full throttle, the surest sign yet that training camp is under way in Minnesota...

I am not a Pakcers fan or hater, a Favre fan or hater, or a Viking fan or hater. However, I despise bad journalism. This isn't bad journalism. It's flat-out lying. The bad journalism happened the previous day when nearly every sports news organization in America reported that Brett Favre said he was retiring.

The actual story was this: someone reported that players and front office types had received text messages from Favre saying he would retire. Favre offered no comment and in the ESPN reports I saw, which accounted for half of SportsCenter (I was on the road and so had cable TV access) they could find not a single person to confirm this report.

Where I come from, that's not a story. Summarized in a sentence, it sounds like this: "There appears to be no evidence supporting rumors that make someone look bad." That's not journalism, that's the  Dreyfus Affair.

The next day, Favre denied the report. The Vikings front office denied the report. In other words, by all accounts, it was untrue. This was Scott Van Pelt's apt explanation for ESPN's endless coverage of the non-story: "Forget Tuesday happened."

Did Favre flip-flop? Not at all; he never made the original claim. It was the sports media that flip-flopped in a craven attempt to cover up their collective lack of journalistic integrity. The sports media ran with a story that was false and quite frankly defamatory. And then the next day, reporter Jon Krawczynski and his fellow apologists at the AP attempted to blame Favre for their incompetence by trading on his known penchant for ambivalence. 

Any good journalist knows that the best-believed lies are big and bald-faced. In the same story, Krawczynski repeated the false claim that "a day earlier, Favre texted some teammates and Vikings officials...that he planned to retire" without citing a single first-person source, though several players and officials denied it. Then he blamed Favre for creating the mess. The end result is that this completely fabricated event will become part of Favre's permanent life history, to be repeated in every story and every remembrance of the great quarterback.

There are a lot of sports journalists who owe Brett Favre a public apology today. But I'll bet that not one of the hundreds across the country who libeled the Viking QB has even the self-awareness to realize what an incompetent he is. 

It's the same thinking (and many of the same people) that allows baseball journalism to remain mired 30 years behind the times in its coverage of that sport.

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