Gwinn - Bias In The Booth : an Insider Exposes How The Sports Media Distort The News

Copyright 2015 by Dylan Gwinn

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First ebook edition 2015

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For my parents, Bruce and Vinia Gwinn

CONTENTS

S ometimes its easier to say what a book is not, as opposed to saying what it actually is. So, lets start there. What youre holding in your hand right now is not a book about sports. Nor is it a traditional book about the sports media where I catalogue and detail a career spent covering and writing about the biggest stars in sports and blah, blah, blah, blah.

No, what youre holding in your hand is something altogether different. This is a book about how virtually the entire sports media have been overrun with liberal activists trying to implement and advance their liberal agenda.

Ive been watching sports for most of my life. Being that Ive made a career in sports talk radio, Ive probably watched a lot more sports than is healthy or advisable. Like many of you, I remember a time when people flocked to sports because they were fun and entertaining, even awe-inspiring at their best, and an escape from the BS and politically correct hysteria of the real world.

Political news and commentary were something you didnt often find in sports, because they were contentious and harsh, a serious business where the burdens of the real world were hung around your neck. Sports were an oasis, a safe zone, that one place where you could shut out all the frustrations and nonsense and seriousness of life and morph into an overgrown, screaming, jumping, foam-finger-waving thirteen-year-old.

Now that former safe zone has become a political crazy zone, as broadcasters, writers, and TV personalities who are supposed to be talking about Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, Bryce Harper and Justin Verlander, Dwight Howard and Kevin Love, wax silly on everything from religion and politics to homosexuality, rape, race-baiting, and every other form of progressive nuttiness you can imagine. Were fast approaching a point where theres going to be no real difference between Bob Costas and Rachel Maddow. Except one of them is a man. I think.

Not that the sports medias leftward slouch wasnt always there. I always knew the sports media were liberal. But their liberalism was tempered by the fact that their primary job was sports, and thats where they needed to focus their attention. I could deal with the occasional politically correct quip from Bob Costas as long as it was only occasional and the sports-to-politics balance was heavily tilted toward sports.

But nowadays that scale is about as balanced as a tilt-a-whirl. Politicsand the sports medias desire to advance a political agendanow determine what stories get covered. Meet, for instance, seventh-round draft pick Michael Sam, an otherwise unremarkable player cut from the final roster of the team that drafted him, not signed onto their practice squad, and yet a headliner in the sports media for months, all because the liberal media have adopted certain sexual practices as worthy of a crusade.

In the spirit of saying what this book is not, I wish to make clear that I have no desire for the sports media to be conservative either. Im not writing this book because I want to shift their ideology and worldview from liberal to conservative. Im writing this book because I want the sports media to talk about sports, not politics. In short, I want the sports media to do their job.

But the inescapable fact of the matter is that the sports media, along with the mainstream media, have become just another font of liberal activism. A decade and a half ago, former Emmy Awardwinning CBS journalist (and a correspondent for HBOs Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel) Bernard Goldberg wrote a classic number one New York Times bestseller about American journalism called Bias. Goldberg at the time was a liberal himself, but he was appalled at the casual yet pervasive bias of his mainstream media colleagues who werent interested in simply reporting the facts, or even telling the truth, but were focused on advancing a left-wing agenda, often without even thinking about it, so deeply ingrained was their bias. He thought that was unprofessionaland he was right.

In sports, the stakes might be smaller, but in some ways the offense is even worse. Fans have a right to enjoy a game, or a discussion of sports topics, without feeling like theyre being put through a social indoctrination regimen, especially a social indoctrination program thats run by people whose sole accomplishment in life is that they can remember who hit cleanup for the Big Red Machine in the seventies. (Side note: it was Johnny Bench.) And thats part of the problem too. Many sports reporters and commentators recognize that they deal in trivialities, and yet they want to make a bigger impact on society, they want to feel more important, they want to inflate their egos by lecturing you, and as a consequence they often do their real jobs not very well. This book is for all of us who find ourselves wanting to shout, Shut up and give me the box score!

R adio is an industry dominated by white people. In all honesty, it looks an awful lot like a Mumford & Sons concert in there: shaggy beards and ill-fitting jeans mixed with a healthy dose of malnutrition and metrosexuality. You know the types. Yet one day in early 2012, I sat show-prepping in the newsroom, sitting with a black producer and a black intern. Eventually our discussion turned to a story that had dwarfed all other news: Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

The headlines were that the local prosecutors would not charge George Zimmerman with Trayvon Martins murder. This greatly upset the producer and the intern. But then our conversation turned to the sports community.

PRODUCER: I just wish somebody would stand up and do something. Like maybe a Florida team; if they would just make a statement it would bring the kind of attention this deserves.

INTERN: Oh absolutely. But nobody probably will.

ME: Why do you want that? How is it the job of a sports team, or a sports league, to get involved in a murder trial?