Perceived bias

Recently had a caller to the desk express shock when I told him I didn't care that the Local Heroes lost. We often have drunks phone looking for a shoulder to cry on.
"How can you not cheer for the (Local Heroes)!" he shouted.
Didn't have the heart to tell him we on the desk actually cheer for the Local Heroes to lose. The NHL playoffs become a bitch when the Local Heroes qualify because the newspaper's management doubles our pages without offering extra help and if they go too far it runs into what qualifies for our summer.

 

The only thing worth rooting for is no overtime.

 

Amen bbnews. Every time someone asks which team will win or who do I want to win, I always reply "I'm cheering for a fast, overtime-free game". Most get a kick out of it but some give me the dirty look.

 

The, "He writes for the (team/school)" sentence construction is very, very common. I would say that people use it in lieu of "about the (team/school)" at least 3/4 of the time, if not more.

Fans are fans, and I think they find it much more interesting if you are an insider than if you are just some schlub covering the team as an outsider looking in. We're journalists, so we like being positioned as the pain-in-the-ass outsider trying to worm our way in. But that's not something that your average star-struck fan can relate to.

It is also indicative that they don't see what sports writers do as analogous to what news reporters do. They mostly want news reporters to be unbiased SOB's. They want sports reporters to be their representative in the press corps.

 

As a parent of a 7-year-old, this ^.

 

I remember when the Chargers beat the favored Steelers to reach the Super Bowl in 1995, and then, of course, got creamed by the 49ers.

After the SB game, there were actually a couple of Steeler fans who called in to the Union-Tribune's sports desk to gloat about the Chargers losing so badly. Yeah, they called the San Diego paper, where there were actually a bunch of people who weren't particularly fans of the Chargers and where a couple of sports deskers were actually from Pennsylvania and rooted for the Steelers. And at least one of them had actually called long distance from Pittsburgh to do it.

 

Or a game that doesn't blow up my lede with five minutes left.... or a score table that has easy access to the books and cooperative time keepers.... or a coach who isn't a flat out dick, or takes a half hour in the locker room, leaving me alone with the janitor.

I'm a fan of any one of those, along with a couple others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

 

I think sometimes there are cases of nonjournalists not choosing their words as carefully as we do. Just because somebody says you write "for" State U doesn't necessarily mean they think you work for them. If somebody asks "who you play next?" it might not mean they think you are a fan, just that they know you are traveling with the team.

Obviously there are dumbasses that never get it, but not all of them are like that.

 

Had one publisher crowing through the newsroom the week of the sectional football semifinals about how "we" were going to win the game. Finally had to ask someone "when did the Podunk Shopping News get a football team?"

This is part of why I break up prep beats until the playoffs. No one's identified with one team, plus it lets us see more players so we can make better evaluations come time to pick all-county teams. Still doesn't stop some of the true believers or looney-tunesparents in screaming about bias, but those are hopeless causes anyway.

 

I don't think that people necessarily think that you are on the team payroll.

But I do think a lot of them think that the teams give all the marching orders, similar to Chad Pennington's lecture a few years back about what "privilege" it is to cover the New York Jets.

 

Yes!

I went from sports to news last year. I've yet to have someone approach me in a courtroom prior to a sentencing and ask which side I'm rooting for.

"Uh, I'm rooting for the defendant ... you know, the guy who punched a 2-year-old girl into a coma and a collapsed lung. I really hope he gets probation today."

 

As a 31-year-old who still enjoys watching good cartoons, this.