When he urged me to supplement my experience with research, I was frustrated by how little there was to read on the topic of local sportscasting. Few have paused to appreciate – much less examine – the important issues of sports TV. I was for the most part on my own.

I carry this frustration with me to this final project. To bring a sense of finality to my internship, Dr. Schultze urged me to formulate the ideas and issues I encountered throughout the semester into written form, a sort of credo to take with me should I enter sports TV. Given my frustration at the lack of existing analysis, and since Dr. Schultze’s assignment was deliberately vague, I have taken the freedom to expand on various ideas related to how I view my potential career. Not all are specifically tied to sportscasting at the local level, but all stem from main themes I encounter as I embark on local sports TV. 
Given that my exact career destination changes almost daily, and my understanding of the issues of sports broadcasting deepens just as often, this is very much a work in progress.

Common problems with sportscasting
• Hero worship. Sportscasters are the first to exaggerate, embellish, lionize, and deify human beings for their athletic feats. Superstar athletes do amazing things, and the media are there to assign superhuman status to people like Michael Jordan, Mark McGwire, and Tiger Woods. Indeed, Jordan through his media presence in particular helped redefine what it means to be a celebrity of any sort. In one sense, we must observe that things are far better than in the ancient days of sport, when statues of successful athletes became altars where people presented offerings. But still today, making mountains out of men is not without its problems. 

On a lesser level, sportscasters also tend to manufacture heroes out of non-superstars. Above-average players are sometimes described with superlatives, although their athletic feats hold little transcendent value. A similar trend is to justify the misbehavior of athletes, or to magnify the ordinary lives of athletes, because of their athletic status.

There are three problems with this trend in sportscasting. One, it is sometimes a substitute for more substantive analysis or information about an athlete or event. Two, it can function to contribute to the massive institution of sports marketing, whose sole purpose to exist is to sell T-shirts, posters, and the like. Third, and related, it contributes to the modern media phenomenon of making or buttressing myths of celebrity – media figures who represent the ideals of the perfect American life, when in fact the characters at the center of these myths are entirely persona and not genuine.

• Hatchet jobs. This is the opposite problem, when the media portrays an athlete as a villain with no chance of recovery from being an evil person. (It follows the Hollywood Catechism, which holds that evil is caused by a few evil people in the world, and the rest of us are basically good.) It often happens when an athlete breaks the law and becomes a target for fan anger. Here the tactic may be employed because it is so sure to resonate with the audience – piling on taps into widespread fan anger over athletes who are in general perceived as getting special treatment. The examples of Albert Belle, Latrell Sprewell, and John Rocker are cases of genuine misbehavior embellished into full-scale villain-manufacturing by an overzealous press. The danger here is again the absence of substantive analysis, crowded out by the piling on.

These first two problems are not as serious among sports reporters as they are among fans in general. However, professional sports analysts must be held to a higher standard, since they are paid to convey the importance of sports. 

• Fear of complex, controversial stories. 
Complication and genuine controversy are shunned by most sports media in favor of the aforementioned process of mythmaking, masculinity-making, and pseudo controversy. While sportscasters are busy telling their tales about superhero athletes, sapped-up comeback stories, or exaggerated sagas of personal triumph over adversity, more meaningful and important stories about communities and American society are left untouched. There are way too few stories involving the community issues surrounding sports, including the untouchable political stories of public stadium financing (whether this is good use of public money), patterns of sexism or homophobia in organized sports, the good-old-by politics of front offices, the marketing exploitation of young sports fans, and so on. These are interesting and important, but off the beaten path of mainstream media. 

Many such stories are dismissed as out of reach of a broad audience or something score-reading announcers shouldn’t have to bother with. But these types of stories may have broader and deeper implications on the audience, and contain plenty of drama, conflict, and relevance for a hard-working reporter to convey. And besides, sportscasters are readily willing to engage in psychology, with their clichéd tales of personal struggle that may are more pop psych than sports. They have already assumed the task of doing something besides sports during a sportscast. Now they need to select the correct diversions. 

• Stand up comedians. The success of witty, spontaneous, and cynical sportscasters on ESPN, which came to a head (or two heads) when Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick co-anchored “SportsCenter,” spawned a generation of poor and misguided imitations at the local level. Some blame Olbermann and Patrick for opening the doors to lame highlight narration on local sportscasts, but it should be noted that many sportscasters’ imitations are flawed: they think comedy first and journalism second, a mistake Olbermann and Patrick generally and nobly avoided. Olbermann and Patrick were also fueled by intellect and writing skills, of which their humor was a worthwhile extension, while the breed of quasi-humor they inspired has no such wit, timing, craft, and gravitas (more on this later). Sportscasters need to work harder at being reporters and writers. Contrary to what they and their bosses believe, their shtick is getting old with viewers. 

• Macho talk. Sports is one of the last remaining areas of society where archaic conceptions of masculinity, the subordination of women, and the desire of bestial attributes all thrive. Consider, for a moment, all of the familiar sports TV clichés that do little to analyze or report what transpired during competition, but do reinforce these false fronts of masculinity: giving 110 percent, stepping it up, getting it done, taking it to the next level, he’s a gamer, we just have to go out there and execute, etc. These are full of sound and fury but signify little. They are overused to a comical extent. More subtly, violent values predominate athletic competition and its coverage in the media – a violent collision will be praised by announcers or replayed to rock music. Football Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott is remembered fondly for once having cut off a finger as a player rather than miss playing games to allow the finger to heal. This is seen as a standard of “toughness” to which all athletes should measure up. An especially interesting dynamic comes with the emergence of mainstream women’s sports. The same macho talk is used to describe women’s sports, since no commensurate language has yet developed for women’s sports (or no one has bothered to try). So women are lauded for their masculine traits – their “toughness” and fierceness in competition. To be fair, women athletes strive for these standards themselves, perhaps since many of them grew up competing with their brothers and other male athletes. It will be interesting to see how TV sportscasters adjust to describing female athletics, and whether they will find another language to better fit a different type of competition.

These are just some of the problems in current sports journalism, ones which few sports journalists seem bent on addressing. Incidentally, no one loses as much sleep over the problems with sports media as they do over the problems with the news media, since the news media are perceived to be doing more important work. However, the importance of communicating about major cultural figureheads like Mark McGwire and Tiger Woods, the function sports serves in communities, and the level to which sportscasters communicate to their audience about gender attributes means their work is anything but trivial, and should be viewed as carrying the cultural weight it does.

Issues of local sports TV
• The SportsCenter effect. In the infancy of sports segments on news programs, the segments were the viewers’ only link, besides live game action, to sports on television. If the segment featured a football highlight, that was likely the only way the viewer could see the particular football game unless the viewer had watched the entire game live. Thus the focus was on communicating the most important stories and games in sports from that day or week. 

With the advent of ESPN, the first 24-hour sports network, and its popularity surge in the late 80’s to early 90’s, and the subsequent development of a handful of 24-hour sports networks devoted entirely to news and highlights, the 3-minute sportscast on the local news can no longer offer merely the most important stories and highlights, for they might have already been seen multiple times on cable. 

What local sportscasters seem reluctant to realize is that this means they must recommit themselves to local sports. As yet, ESPN does not show high school sports, and sports at this level is integral to the community. Additionally, local sportscasts must focus more clearly on the local angle to a national story – the local following for Tiger Woods’ at a local PGA Tour event, for example, or the local member of the Olympic organizing committee. The local sports simply cannot be just another place to get the same old highlights with alternate punch lines from the national shows.

• The Fox Sports effect. Now an entirely different dynamic is at work with the debut of Fox Sports’ Regional Sports Report. Just recently, Fox Sports Net introduced 32 regional sports highlight shows that will include the most pertinent local stories, at whatever level of competition. Thus the commitment by local sports departments, who typically have a better connection to the community than cable outlets, to covering local stories or providing the local angle to the national story must be revisited.

• Dumb TV news. The local sportscast exists within the genre of one of the most unimaginative styles of television programming – the local newscast. This is a format that is basically unchanged from its introduction over four decades ago, and resembles a machine in the manner it turns out similar-sounding stories that play on myths of the American values of individual actualization and the possibility of human perfectablility. 

The local newscast is draped in inane banter between otherwise-professional-looking and sounding news anchors and reporters. In this context of exaggerated giddy grins over a sunny day or hot air balloon at the fair, the idea that significant mass communication to a community is taking place is elusive. 

The importance of the local newscast to a network affiliate station cannot be overstated. Typically it is the only program on the station that makes the station money, since affiliates must pay to carry programming they do not produce. This does something to explain the happy talk and careless sensationalism of crime and fires  - all aim at hooking an audience and keeping them hooked. A station will take great lengths to have its logo appear on billboards or its personalities at community events. After all, the station isn’t just reporting the news, it’s selling a brand name by the only locally lucrative vehicle possible – the local newscast. 

The sports segment is often seen as a symptom of the watering down of local news – since the transition from reporting a double murder to the weekend scores is awkward (though too many doe-eyed anchors are up to the task). Thus the duty for the sportscaster must be to reflect the importance to the community and culture of the athletes, fans, stadiums, memories, emotions, and art of sports. Sports are very relevant to any program claiming to communicate about the community. In a way, it is too bad that local news has been ghettoized, so that sports and weather are not meant to be taken seriously, while the lead story is. On the other hand, such a format can take advantage of the ruination and decontextualization of old-school news by happy talk and swift transitions. Sports is all by itself, and as such, it has a better chance to be heard in a new way.

What sportscasting should be
Meaningful sports journalism must reflect sensitivity to and knowledge of the following issues:

• Storytelling.  Ultimately, journalism is about telling stories. Television is the ultimate storytelling medium, what with its sit-coms, dramas, and game shows. Sports provide some of the most dramatic, compelling, suspenseful, pure, and personally interesting stories on television. The stand-up comedian sportscasters must remember they exist to tell stories, and their narratives shape the culture.

• Cultural gatekeeping. Since culture is a system of shared meaning, and communication is the sharing of said meaning, communication is to culture what air is to respiration. Sportscasters are integral parts of this cultural facilitation. Cultural myths (financial happniness, self-actualization, masculine ideals, etc.) flow within the telling of sports stories. Too many sportscasters are oblivious to these implications.

• Community. Both amateur and professional sports teams represent a community – be it a school, a church, or a city. The function is to advance community pride and as well as bring community members face to face. Even individual athletes carry a banner from their hometown or state to a larger stage, and also bring about community pride and unity. As both college and pro sports focus more and more on marketing, sportscasters must look to find the community element in stories. 

• History. Sports events help define our history. People remember where they were on the particular day of a major sporting event in the same manner they remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. The history this past century of black and women athletes is significant in American history as a whole. Sports is a part of history, and helps to write history in progress.

• Race. Sports are the first things blacks and whites ever did together as equals, when they sat down to watch Jackie Robinson. Since sports are about bringing people together, this is a fascinating study in the dynamics of American racial relationships. Even today, as racial/social barriers continue to separate black and white, everyone can talk about the Super Bowl or the basketball season on equal footing. Michael Jordan ignited excitement in kids from the poorest areas of downtown Chicago and businessmen in suits alike. Sports are egalitarian. At the same time, other racial issues in sports buttress racial problems in society. The predomination of black athletes and white owners raises questions about racial genetics that get to the heart of how Americans view each other based on the inherent color of their skin. Poorer fans, many of them black, are being turned away from pro sports in favor of rich businessmen, many of them white. The ways sports both blur and underscore lines of race is a fascinating anthropological study.

• Gender. The point to be made about women in sports is that with the acceptance of women athletes in the mainstream (witness the popularity of the women’s soccer team and the Williams sisters), the population of participants and spectators in athletics potentially doubles. That is not true of any other area of society. Also, the disproportionately high number of homosexual female athletes and disproportionately low number of homosexual male athletes reflects attributes of gender that guide discussion about who we are as men and women.

• Unity. If human relationships in an increasingly technology-shaped, post-modern world are more distant and involve less and less human contact, sports are a throwback. Sports maintain the modernistic values of many people coming together for a common reason. In fact, sports are about the only reason more than 10,000 or people will physically gather for anymore. Sports bring people together, and in a society that is increasingly isolated, that will endure.

Keith Olbermann
A few notes on Keith Olbermann, the sportscaster who raised all sorts of issues about what sportscasting should be. Indeed, he revolutionized sportscasting like few others since the iconoclastic Howard Cosell. Ironically, Olbermann is blamed, and rightly so, for inspiring a generation of anti-reporters, comedian wannabes, even though he shows more sensitivity to the above issues than any of his peers. What this accusation overlooks, though, are the writing and reporting elements of Olbermann’s approach. The countless imitators do injustice to the quality of Olbermann’s work by imitating him so narrow-mindedly. 

Olbermann is a writer, arguably the best writer to work primarily in television the medium has ever known. His sentences are thoughtfully crafted, his word choice is not shaped by an ever-dumbed-down television atmosphere, his ideas are insightful, and his humor smooths it all out. He is an intellectual, and there are simply very few intellectuals who work in television.

Olbermann is also set apart by his refusal to let the institution of television shape him. The majority of people who work in television on the creative side are self-censored – they tailor their work according to what will most likely result in the advancement of their career. Olbermann has always butted heads with his employers based on principle – he is known for standing up for colleagues (and workers he far outranks) when he is not required to. He helped bring the issue of sexual harassment at ESPN to light. To be fair, he sometimes connects his ego with principle to the point of being overbearing and selfish. But he is also a prophetic voice in a world of big media that increasingly shuts out all voices but their own. 

What must sportscasters learn from Olbermann? How he is in tune with history, constantly connecting current events to obscure but helpful ones from the past. How he takes bold but balanced looks at how the dynamics of race and sexuality permeate athletics and vice versa. How he connects sports to pop culture, of which sports are an important part. How he has married the world of the intellectual with the world of athletics, which few before thought was possible or necessary (it is both). How he values writing as an art, carefully using wise words in a picture-dominated medium. If sportscasting is one of the spheres of creation ruined by the fall (as all are), Olbermann is an agent of redemption. 
• Keith Olbermann page

Sports journalism should be some of the best journalism out there because it covers such drama, conflict, culture, pageantry, history, personality, spontaneity, and art. This doesn't mean a below-average journalist can be a good sports journalist, since the stories are easier to find, but it does mean that good stories are waiting to be told. Sadly, we hear too few of them.

Sportscasting is being redefined in an age of new media. Just a few examples include the transmission of information via the Internet -- which calls sportscasters in print, radio, and television to more description, perspective, history, culture, and insight – and the innovations like Fox Sports Net’s regional broadcasts, which call local media to re-commit to local stories.

It’s a good time to step back and think about what sportscasting does, and what it should do. Sportscasting is a field sorely in need of redemptive agents with the vision and skill of doing the job with all of the above issues, and their complex relationship to each other, in mind.