Travis Marmon
I’ve been pursuing journalism as a possible career option since I was 16 years old. More specifically, I’ve had an ever-growing interest in sports journalism, serving as Sports Editor here at the Voice for three years and working as a sports intern at The Oakland Press at home in Michigan in the summer of 2011.
Unfortunately, as the journalism industry has struggled to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle, worse and worse articles have become the norm in the fight for page views. It seems that every day somebody writes a controversial or downright vitriolic column just to raise their profile or bring attention to their publication. This has been particularly noticeable in the world of sports journalism, and, as an aspiring writer, it pains me every time I see it.
If you have even a basic awareness of American sports, you have no doubt heard about the controversy regarding the Washington Redskins and the organization’s refusal to change their name. Notoriously scummy owner Dan Snyder has argued that the name is a proud tradition and that many Native Americans take pride in it, ignoring the fact that the team was founded by noted horrible racist George Preston Marshall and that the remaining Native American population in the United States is rarely heard from. ESPN’s Rick Reilly, who has been an awful writer for years, wrote a column last month defending the name, arguing that none of the Native Americans he knows are offended by it, including his father-in-law Bob Burns, a Blackfeet elder.
The problem (or rather, the biggest of many problems) is that he completely misquoted Burns to make his point. “The whole name is silly to me,” Burns said according to Reilly. “The name doesn’t bother me that much. It’s an issue that shouldn’t be an issue.” Sounds like a safe name then, right? Wrong. Burns wrote an op-ed for Indian Country last week in which he took Reilly to task for his horrendous journalism skills. “What I actually said was ‘It’s silly in this day and age that this should even be a battle — if the name offends someone, change it,’” Burns wrote. Later in the column he said that Reilly portrayed him as an Uncle Tom. Reilly (as is to be expected because he is terrible) issued a non-apology over Twitter claiming that he felt he quoted Burns accurately. He has gone completely unpunished by ESPN over this blatant violation of journalistic ethics because ESPN is also terrible.
But it’s not just the world’s most powerful sports media organization that deems this kind of miserable writing acceptable. Phil Mushnick of The New York Post (I know, not the most respectable publication in the first place) wrote an article on Sunday following the death of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson’s two-year-old son, who was allegedly beaten by the mother’s boyfriend. Peterson was unaware that the child was his until the child was near death, because there was never a paternity test and he lost contact with the mother. In short, Peterson got to meet his child for the first time while the child was on his deathbed, then chose to play on Sunday rather than be consumed by grief.
In Mushnick’s eyes, this makes Peterson a bad father. “I’d be fighting for breath, my knees weak with grief, demanding to know why, who, how,” Mushnick said before going on to suggest that Peterson must have not cared about the child (that again, he never knew he had) and making a point to bring up that Peterson’s father was arrested for drug charges.
Not only is this a distressing example of victim-blaming, it’s not the first time Mushnick has written something blatantly racist. This is the man who once suggested that the Brooklyn Nets change their name to the “Brooklyn N*****s” and call the cheerleaders the “Bitches” or “Hoes” after Jay-Z helped move the organization and change the uniforms, because that would be “Jay-Z hip.” Somehow he is still employed by a supposedly professional publication.
These are just two examples of the decline of good writing in the modern age. Sports writing might be more relevant to my interests than to yours, but I’m sure any active reader can come up with a variety of shockingly bad articles from once respected outlets in recent memory. Journalism becomes a more depressing industry every day, and the only people that can change it are those in the audience. Stop giving page views to bad writers (I was guilty of doing this for the sake of this viewpoint). Don’t watch ESPN just because they’re “the worldwide leader in sports.” Start reading well-researched and well-written papers and websites. It’s the only way to get the Rick Reillys and Phil Mushnicks of the world to go back to the abyss from which they came.