Fantasy Baseball Cafe Forums

by **acsguitar** » Wed May 02, 2007 11:31 am

I'm looking to gather examples of homer Journalists writing at a national level.

As a media comm major I'm always interested in the state of national media. I find it disturbing that National Outlets such as yahoo, cnn, sportsline, espn put out articles almost as fact when in fact the writer is a homer for the specific team being discussed.

Example:

Dice K Takes a Bite out of Apple
By Dan Wetzel

Now here is an article that praises Dice K for letting up 4 runs against the Yankees. Not a great feat by any means but it gets its own article. II'll keep my Yankee homerism out of this as much as possible but lets look at Wetzel's bio.

Wetzels Bio from Sportsline

The closest Dan Wetzel ever came to major-league sports was hawking popcorn as a 14-year-old at Fenway Park. The main sport then was conning Yuppies out of their change.

Wetzel, 29, attended the University of Massachusetts and held internships with the Indianapolis News and Chicago Tribune following graduation. He spent five years as an editor and writer at Basketball Times and has won 14 national writing awards including five consecutive years in investigative reporting from the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

Now I always learned that your job as a journalist is not to root for the home team. You can't cheer in the press box. To me homer journalism is equivalent to rooting in the press box and is extremely unprofessional.

So I was hoping that people could post articles they deem homer articles.

List the article and the reason why the journalist is a homer.

No Yankees/Redsox bickering or I'll ask that the thread gets closed.

That is if anyone responds at all! :-D

by **Coppermine** » Wed May 02, 2007 11:43 am

I think it depends if the article is just a write-up of the game, or if it's an opinion/analysis column. If you're writing for a Boston-area newspaper, you're obviously going to focus on the home team because that's why you assume people are reading the Boston Globe. But if you work for CBS, and you're just writing about a game, then there shouldn't be homerism as you pointed out in your example.

MLB.com has an interesting approach. There is the MLB home page, and as part of the network is a page dedicated to each MLB team... I really like the format on MLB.com and all the team pages connected to it. Next to the scores of completed games on MLB.com you can click a "Wrap" link that takes you to an article about the game itself.

What's interesting, is that it points you to two articles.... one written from the perspective of a writer from each team.

For example: this is the "wrap" page from last night's Orioles-Tigers game.

There's two stories; one written by the Orioles writers is headlined "O's Bullpen Taxed" while the Tiger's writer's article headline is "Casey Comes Through."

Both articles are technically written from a neutral, journalistic perspective but it's a great example of home-town bias... even if it really is intentional. You assume that people visiting baltimoreorioles.com are there to read about their home team. The O's article starts off talking about the O's pitching problems and an over-worked bullpen. The Tigers article starts by praising Sean Casey's game-winning hit.