Mass Media and Sports Reporting

Mass and social media outlets have thrusted athletics into everyone's lives. With each advance in technology, reporting on sports and their players have become more and more in depth and speculative. Newspapers used to be the only way to find a blurb about the previous day's sporting activities. Then, the radio introduced live broadcasting of the games. Since then, the invention of TV and the Internet have allowed fans to become very familiar with their favorite athletes. There seem to be zero boundaries between the lives of the players on and off the court.

Television has even expanded its role exponentially, in a very short time. There are countless channels available for every major sport. Every game can be viewable by fans if they pay for the premium packages. All sports stations, like ESPN, have also expanded the job of reporting sports. They went from showing short, choppy clips, to streaming scores, broadcasting major sporting events, and even into live look-ins of the sporting news all day. Now that everyone can view Facebooks, Twitters, etc. the live television broadcasts of shows like Sportscenter have shifted from presenting recaps of games to talking about speculative news about the players. There isn't a day that Sportscenter live airs without an interruption from a breaking news story that generates from a social media source. There were a couple of weeks during the NBA season that Sportscenter constantly tried to break the story of Carmelo Anthony being traded. They would get leads from anywhere, regardless of the credibility. It made them look bad because they didn't do good reporting and just talk to the source of these negotiations.

The Internet has allowed athletes to become icons in more ways than just their actions on the field or court. Websites, such as Twitter, have turned into an athlete's stomping ground. With Twitter, fans follow what their favorite players off-court actions on a Tweet by Tweet basis. Player's feelings can be updated at any time by cell phone, computer, iPad, etc. There have been multiple fines handed out because players are Tweeting during their games. Players have even entered the political realm by giving their support to a particular candidate publicly on websites. In the past, people wouldn't have given a thought as to who their favorite athletes were voting for, but now, I'm sure some of them take it into consideration.

Basketball players, for example, have evolved from having to climb a ladder to pick the ball out of the peach basket, to the introduction of the three-point line, to players' thoughts being broadcasted to the world (sometimes during the game).

Bringing it all back to make my point, I believe that professional athletes have become something that they were not intended to be. There's no reason for an athlete to be able to tell me what they had for breakfast or who they went clubbing with the previous night. Not only do I not care, I think there are too many chances for athletes to mess up and portray the wrong message. Not only do they create distractions for themselves, they affect the way people view them. I feel like if I didn't see the bottom of the TV screen that says ESPN, I'd confuse that channel for E! Not saying many people in the class necessarily care about sports, but to those who do, Do you believe that athlete's ability to be 'heard' in the new ways have added to your enjoyment of sports or taken away from it? Should ESPN go away from trying to speculate stories, and return to focus on presenting the simple sporting events? What would you do to make the experience better?