WINSTON-SALEM, NC – Expert panelists at the “Losing to Win: Discussion of Race and Intercollegiate Sports” conference turned their attention partly to the media coverage of minority student-athletes and did not shy away from addressing accusations that media outlets do not always fairly scrutinize Black and other minority athletes. Panelists also decried the lack of minorities working as sports reporters, producers, and editors and admitted the numbers are getting worse, not better.
“We don’t always get it right,” said Tom O’Toole, the prep sports editor at USA Today, in reference to frequently uneven treatment of African-American athletes in the press. “When (reporters) would write stories, and I’m sure that I have been one of them, we would write ‘in code,’” O’Toole said.
“We would say the articulate (player) or the well-spoken (player),” when speaking of an especially intelligent athlete of color. And unfortunately some of these code words still exist today. You’ve heard some of this: Black players are called ‘athletic’; White players are called ‘hard-working … and scrappy.’ There are questions that are asked ‘in code,’ too,” O’Toole said.
The reporters may not think that such writings or their questions are racist in nature, he said, but they are.
Dr. Kevin Blackistone, a sports columnist and frequent panelist on ESPN who currently holds the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland, gave several examples of portrayals of Black athletes in the media and decried the absence of Blacks in newsrooms.
“New media today looks a lot like old media,” he said. “It is owned by Whites and run by Whites who have a proclivity to hire their own. Press rooms and press boxes at major college athletic events in particular are increasingly all-White to the eye. I’ve certainly been in press boxes in the past year or year and a half where I was the only person of color – at least not representing maybe a college newspaper or a college radio station.”
Blackistone said there are “consequences of an increasingly less diverse …, more White sports media covering what is unquestionably a more diverse and … more Black and Brown major-sports-team universe.”
