CT Blue

Sports writers as a group seem to have a marked capacity for moral outrage. Witness, just as an example, Mike DiMauro’s column in today’s Day, in which he expresses a high degree of outrage about a recruiting violation at UConn, the precise details of which I don’t care to know. This is not unusual for DiMauro. His capacity for outrage is unlimited. Nor, as my introductory sentence points out, is DiMauro unique. In fact, I would venture to say he is fairly typical of that part of the Fourth Estate that covers sports. Steroids, doping, you name it, any form of sports cheating gets them going. Why, Mike Francesca and the Mad Dog even deigned to notice women’s basketball when given the chance to natter on about Nykesha Sales’ free basket. Not only are they able to summon up a high degree of outrage, but they see the world in absolutes, having little interest in shades of gray or in making allowances for human weakness, even when the individual involved is young, and perhaps entitled to a few screw ups.

To those of us more interested in those world events that really matter, this is quite frustrating, since it is a marked contrast to the media’s attitude, including that of most editorialists, toward things like torture and constitution shredding, about which the media reaction is most often a world weary shoulder shrugging, or an insistence on concentrating on superficialities.

Nor, unfortunately, is this skewed sense of moral outrage confined to the press. Barry Bonds is being prosecuted for perjury, as the hapless Roger Clemens may be, because they lied about the relatively trivial question of whether they used steroids. They have drawn the attention of both Congress and the Justice Department, both of which have been aggressively quiescent about the obvious perjury of Alberto Gonzales about an issue far more important to the nation.

Why is it that the media appears able to summon up outrage about the trivial world of sports when it is unable to do so about political events? Is there a qualitative difference between those who choose to cover sports and those that choose to cover reality? Maybe so. I often roll my eyes when reading purple prose like that which drips from DiMauro’s pen (today’s column is typical), but maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, the only person in the national media that has expressed the appropriate amount of outrage about the direction in which the Bush folks led this nation was Keith Olbermann, who is a former sportscaster. Maybe the sports minded are more revolted at the idea of cheating than those who choose to cover the more cynical world of politics. After all, a fundamental principle of most sports is an adherence to the rules, with consequences for those that stray. It’s an ethos that leads to outrage when the rules are broken. Maybe we need to draft more sports writers into the political side of things, so the moral outrage they are so capable of expressing can be directed at more appropriate targets.