Baseball Musings: Sports Writing Ethics

December 20, 2005

Sports Writing Ethics

Benjamin Kabak looks at the ethics of the sports media, from the Michael Vick scandal to award voting.

I would disagree a bit on award voting. The MVP, Cy Young and Rookie of the Year voting is structured so that favorite sons can't win. Let's say that every year in voting for the MVP, the sports writers each picked the best player from their local team. The person who wins, in that case, will be the consensus second choice. It's easy to say, "I work with this guy, I like this guy, I'm voting for him #1." But the second choice you think about. So in favorite son voting, the second choice is really the guy you think deserves the award.

This type of voting is called a Borda count, and it's designed precisely to negate the conflict of interest voting. One writer can't make that much difference. People point to Pedro Martinez losing the MVP vote to Ivan Rodriguez because one writer left Pedro off the ballot, but if the other 27 voters all had Pedro #1, Martinez wins that award. There was a clear split in the voting that year, with six different players getting first place votes. What everyone agreed on was that Ivan Rodriguez was near the top, and he won.

So the conflict of interest in MVP voting is overblown. The much bigger conflict, as I see it, is with newspapers and media outlets that own clubs. Chicagoans see this every year in the difference in coverage of the Cubs and White Sox, while Boston fans saw this in the reporting on the general manager negotiations this winter. Maybe there should be a disclosure in every article written about a team that the newspaper owns a share.

Posted by David Pinto at 09:09 AM | News Media | TrackBack (0)

Comments

"Maybe there should be a disclosure in every article written about a team that the newspaper owns a share."

I'm surprised they don't do this. It's standard, Journalism 101 stuff. I think it says more about the relative unimportance of sports coverage, but CNN does it with media and entertainment.

Posted by: steve at December 20, 2005 10:47 AM

I've often seen such notes in Boston Globe articles.

Posted by: Jason at December 20, 2005 11:57 AM

I see this in the Tribune reporting on the Cubs a lot. I don't think it's ever in the game descriptions or opinion columns, but it's always there whenever the paper is talking about something management it doing like player moves or the bleacher construction.

Posted by: Mike at December 20, 2005 12:17 PM

Gee David, you couldn't possibly be referring to, say, the New York Times' ownership stake in the Boston Red Sox now, could you? The same newspaper that had an editorial urging that it would be real nice if the Red Sox won the WS in 2003, and not the Yankees, without disclosing their ownership stake in said Red Sox.

Posted by: rbj at December 20, 2005 03:27 PM

ron mexico

Posted by: colin at December 20, 2005 04:21 PM

re: journalism and ethics - an oxymoron

maybe it's my early experiences with the harvard crimson, where everyone was a cuthroat walking all over each other on their way to the ny times, a pulitzer and a book deal and fame (which a lot of my classmates have gotten), but it seems to me that sports reporting and ethics are definitely an oxymoron in this age of money to be made on the carcass of a ballplayer's reputation.

in philly, at least 30 journalists make their living splaying Allen Iverson's carcass alive each day, like those birds eating Prometheus Bound (an instructive play) each day, just enough to let him live, but more than enought to let him suffer. And all he is is the greatest basketball player ever to suit up in Sixers uniform.

And what did they do to Mike Schmidt for 20 years but destroy him daily?

Steve Carlton stopped talking to the press here.

Dick Allen, who should have been a HOFer, was run out of town by racist journalists.

The type of exploitative journalism now practiced by the media where an athlete is used, c.f. Terrell Owens and Donovan McNabb this year, and relationships destroyed and teams destroyed just to make money and headlines, makes any notion of ethics and journalism together a joke, a poor joke at best.

journalists are a very low form of life indeed.

as for their HOF and MVP voting, Bill James and his pals have dissected the HOF and MVP votes over the years and shown that not only have there been errors over the years based on the win shares analysis, but also gross errors in awarding golden gloves based on fielding win shares analysis. Writers and journalists, who are supposed to have a KNOWLEDGE of the game, in fact don't know much at all; their knowledge of sabrmetrics is poor, they repeat old truisms, they reject moneyball, and for the most part, they sit and drink with the old boys club or sit and drink with their target ballplayer until he spills what they want and then they use it. They don't really care about advancing the state of the game, as teh MONEYBALL authors do.

--arthur john kyriazis
--philadelphia

Posted by: arthur john kyriazis at December 20, 2005 05:30 PM

David,

a factual correction which doesn't alter your specific point: in the 1999 MVP vote in which Texas' Rodriguez and Boston's Martinez finished 1-2, Martinez was entirely left off 2 ballots, by a New York writer and a Minnesota writer.

Posted by: joe arthur at December 20, 2005 06:35 PM

Lavelle E. Neal III was the Minnesota writer, I don't know who the New York writer was, anyone else know?

Posted by: Nate at December 20, 2005 06:43 PM

The repulsive George King of the NY Post. He claimed he didn't believe starting pitchers deserved consideration for the MVP. It didn't take long to discover that he had the Yankees' David Wells pretty high up on his ballot in a previous year.

http://touchingallthebases.blogspot.com

Posted by: Chad Finn at December 20, 2005 07:28 PM

The problem isn't that every writer would pull a homer and vote for a local guy. It is that some do and to different extents. And there are the negative conflicts such as with Belle that are even worse. Belle got jobbed on the MVP in a way that is particularly egregious.

But writers shouldn't vote on awards for a reason that is more compelling than conflicts of interest. Basically, they don't know enough to make good decisions. In football, it is even worse. It is truly scary how little football writers know about the game.

Posted by: stan at December 21, 2005 05:18 AM

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