Napier Week 5

“The Whitening of Sports Media and the Coloring of Black Athletes’ Images” by Kevin B. Blackistone starts by giving quantitative data dealing with a consecutive drop over the years in regards to the percentage of journalists of color in the newsroom, websites, and producers of written media. This study by The American Society of News Editors noted that these numbers continue to drop while the percentage of sport editors who were white increased. The “backdrop” for all of this, as stated by Blackistone, is decades of a lens constructed by white journalists to serve a white audience.

                The article goes farther in discussing the discrimination faced by black athletes as well. Black athletes typically being represented as self-centered and ignorant, while their white counterparts where noted as being diligent and intelligent. It seems that Blackistone is trying to show that correlation between these two images is responsible for the lack of African American men being represented less in the sports media world.

                “The New Toy Department” written by Erin Whitside, Nan Yu, and Marie Hardin discusses the lack of journalistic integrity within sports journalism possibly as a conflict of interests between sports journalists and the organizations they cover as the authors suggest. An example of this conflict of interest being a sports journalist writing a positive piece for the home team as opposed to writing the a story that may damage their reputation.

                Another problem faced in this article is the public’s constant need for news. In the age of the Internet, blogs and online media sources, especially those dealing in sports, tend to put a rush on the story. This leads to inaccuracies that traditional media outlets don’t have much trouble with in comparison. It is the integrity of reporting that is in question; for sports journalism, or any journalism for that matter, to be taken seriously, it needs to come back to the basics.

For my research assignment, I would like to report on Jesse Owens running for the United States in track and field at 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. During this time, Adolf Hitler was trying to show off his "superior" Aryan race; in response, Owens won four gold medals for the USA. He created history by striking against a racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic Germany while representing a country that saw him as less than an equal. This act alone speaks to every one of the functions/principles of journalism. 

-Shawn Napier