Rush to print hurts sports journalism
The crawler across the bottom of the ESPN broadcast Saturday claimed Notre Dame was going to announce its next football coach today.
The report had its roots in The Chicago Sun-Times, and football fans figured the newspaper got the story straight.
I didn't.
I harbor no ill-will toward The Sun-Times; I have had many friends who have worked there. It's a good newspaper -- one with a storied past, a daily with a reputation for excellence, a staple in the Windy City media history.
In hearing the Notre Dame report, I sensed immediately that The Sun-Times had followed the lead of so many newspapers today: It rushed to publish.
I have no way of knowing who the unnamed source of its Notre Dame story was -- not that the source's name mattered. What does matter is that the newspaper reported a story on its website without having all the pieces together, which explains why it later pulled the story.
The Sun-Times is hardly the only daily to have done this in recent months. The rush to be first has bred in journalists a sloppiness that leads to inaccurate information reaching the marketplace.
Such sloppiness hurts the profession's credibility. For Journalism is the truth business. Or at least it used to be the truth business. But like so many businesses today, the journalism has changed. The Internet has reshaped it, fostering a get-it-first mentality at the expense of accurate reporting.
Accuracy has long been one of the canons of daily journalism. In a cardinal rule to his newsroom staff, the late publisher Joseph Pulitzer put it best: "Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy."
Pulitzer, who lorded over a newspaper chain in the 1800s and early 1900s, figured his newspapers served no good if they couldn't get their facts straight, and he was right.
Then and now, readers have counted on the media - newspapers above all else - to play the watchdog's role, to take readers where they can't go without unless the press takes them there: locker rooms, courtrooms, courtside, sidelines, sideshows, showrooms, boardrooms, backrooms, backseats, front-row seats, lounge seats, convention seats, cheap seats.
The press shows them a world hidden to most of readers, and it shows that world in all its ingloriousness: the bad, the ugly and the good. It reveals that world through hard facts - through unassailable truths, not through the innuendos and the rumormongering of tabloid media: TMZ, The National Enquirer or the like.
Somewhere in the emergence of the wired world, the daily press has lost its bearings. It has reported falsehoods with so much regularity that it is hard to discern when to believe the press and when not to. It is no more reliable than the weather forecast for July 4, 2012.
The world is lessened because The Sun-Times was dead wrong about Notre Dame, whose search for a new football coach has people's attention. What's happening with its coaching search might be interesting news to follow; it isn't, however, as important as the flagging U.S. economy, the war in Afghanistan or national healthcare.
But the inaccuracy of the Notre Dame story (and of similar stories) raises a legitimate question: If the press can't get the meaningless stories right, how can anybody count on it to get the important stories right?
