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Damar Hamlin’s Horrifying Collapse Gives Some Football Writers Pause

I’m well aware of the many ways I benefited in my years as a sports journalist from the popularity of football. That’s true for all the sports media that report on, and therefore indirectly promote, football at any level. More readership and ratings. More status and money. It’s all good until a moment comes along that demands a look in the mirror and an answer to the question “Should I really be doing this?” I saw some of that in the aftermath of Monday night’s horrifying collapse of Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin seconds after a normal tackle on live national TV. Emergency medical staff administered CPR and electrical shock while players kneeled and prayed and cried. Fans in the stadium hushed. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Students Discover Hating on Journalists Has No Age Minimum

Smart college journalism students enhance their classroom work by doing internships or joining a campus outlet. They get to experience the real thing: published stories seen by an audience, with all the potential good and bad consequences that professionals face. Because, really, student journalists are journalists who just happen to be students. This is a great philosophy. Until it isn’t. The Washington Post recently published an alarming story with this headline: “Online mobs are now coming for student journalists.” It details severe online harassment of college journalists around the U.S., leaving some spooked and reconsidering their planned career. Primarily using social media channels, attackers hurl physical threats, obscenities and insults about personal appearance. They also doxx (publicly revealing private contact information). Not surprisingly, women, racial minorities and gender identity minorities get it the worst. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Crime Stories Are Everywhere, but You Really Can Go Outside

The news media love crime stories, which, of course, is the fault of the audience for giving them clicks and ratings. But some commentators on the press offer unreservedly brutal words for how journalists do crime coverage: —Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli of Free Press wrote for Nieman Lab in 2020: “Crime coverage is terrible. It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve.” —Kelly McBride of Poynter told an online seminar in 2021 that years from now, “newsrooms will issue apologies for the harm they caused” with their crime reporting. For good measure, she called it “journalistic malpractice.” Yikes. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Author Documents Police Killings of African Americans During Jim Crow

In the spring of 1941, outside a movie theater in Fairfield, John Jackson waited with his girlfriend to see a show. A white police officer ordered Jackson and the other people in line, all African Americans, to clear the sidewalk. But Jackson, laughing and joking with his girlfriend, did not hear the order. When challenged by one officer, Jackson asked, “Can’t I laugh?” The police officers forced Jackson into the back of their squad car, beat him severely and shot him four times. He died before reaching the police station. Three years later, in Donalsonville, Georgia, an “elderly Negro woman” did or said something (or perhaps, nothing at all) that displeased the white clerk in a general store. The 20-year-old clerk followed the woman outside and beat her to death with an ax handle. Neither the Fairfield cop nor the store clerk, or countless other white killers like them, went to jail for their crimes. White-on-black violence was both a result and a pillar of Jim Crow. For African American men and women, even “the most commonplace encounters” with whites could turn lethal. And it is this aspect of the Jim Crow system, in which whites could do violence to black people with impunity, all the while being empowered and protected by the legal system, that is the focus of Margaret A. Burnham’s new book “By Hands Now Known.” Read more.

by James L. Baggett

A Journalist Who Doesn’t Want You to Buy His Book

When the best journalists put their work in book form, they invest exhaustive effort to portray the subject as completely and truthfully as possible. Often, they nail it. Sometimes, in hindsight, they miss. Sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, a New York Times bestselling author whose work includes books on Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Dallas Cowboys, believes he missed with his 2016 book “Gunslinger: The remarkable, improbable, iconic life of Brett Favre.” Remarkably and improbably, Pearlman went on Twitter on Sept. 13 and told his followers not to buy or read Gunslinger. He did so in the immediate wake of news reports that Favre, the retired Green Bay Packers and Southern Mississippi quarterback, knowingly participated in steering $5 million in government money intended for impoverished Mississippi families to building at new volleyball stadium at Southern Miss, where his daughter played on the team. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Tattletales: News Media Love to Call Each Other Out

Sunday marked the final broadcast of CNN’s 30-year-old news media criticism show called “Reliable Sources.” The reasons for the cancellation aren’t clear, but the network’s new CEO has said he wants to cut back on opinion, re-emphasize straight reporting and, notably, attract conservative viewers who have turned off CNN. Good luck with that last part, fella. There’s still plenty of press criticism out there from politicians and other partisans, but less and less from professional reporters who are designated to do so. In addition to losing “Reliable Sources,” the job of “public editor” – a newsroom reporter given the authority and independence to listen to audience complaints and write about their own organization’s failings – has almost disappeared. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg
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