Mark Cuban turns the deck guns on some big names in sports journalism:
In the Entertainment biz, they have very honest job descriptions. Someone who creates and reports gossip is called a gossip columnist. Joan Rivers, Page Six, Cindy Adams, etc. don
Norman Chad is the Art Buchwald of sports columnists… and doesn’t pretend to be something different. Why is Cuban picking on him?
Gosh and I thought Norman Chad was a washed up TV Guide Columnist turned “World Series Of Poker” color analyst!
There is very little genuine “reporting” that takes place in sports journalism. It’s a gossip-driven market. So in that context, I have no objection to more accurate labelling. The only real “reporters” in sports are the beat writers. Columnists are either gossip-purveyors or point/counterpoint writers (i.e. they’re paid to represent a particular settled niche of sports thought.)
I agree with Skip except that there are many more reporters than columnists in this business. A handful of columnists (Wilbon) actually go out and take a look at things for themselves; others are basically talk-radio folks (just like the punditocracy in news).
And yeah, when was the last time Norman Chad pretended to report anything? You may not like him, but he’s hardly presented as anything other than what he is.
1) Beau, Jeff and Tyler have already addressed the absurdity of placing a humor columnist in the company with Sam Smith and Peter Vecsey, whose functions seem to be completely different. In general, Cuban needs to pump his brakes a bit.
2) I guess my question is how much could one identify as honest-to-goodness “gossip” if you looked at your neighborhood sports section, going through story by story. I think the word Cuban’s thinking of is “speculation”, but I’m thinking there’s less of it than he believes.
I really think Vecsey is the worst sports columnist in America. His prose is horrible, his reporting almost always wrong, and his “jokes” are sub-Yakov Smirnoff.
But I do have a soft spot for Chad, because when he had an ESPN.com column in 1996, he once printed my wildly inaccurate prediction that the Cowboys would fire Barry Switzer and replace him with John Madden.