Editorials
Media drops the ball
Mar 29, 2007 2:32 PM
News is a funny business in New York. There are too many times when you pick up a paper or watch television and you wonder: Are they covering the news of a city with 8 million people?
Lots of people were wondering just that as they turned on their television sets on Sunday night, March 18. A couple of hundred knuckleheads started fistfights during a PSAL championship basketball game at Madison Square Garden, then spilled out into the streets and walked, some say menacingly, to Times Square. There were conflicting reports as to whether shots were fired outside the Garden. The papers said yes, the cops on the scene told our reporter no.
The next day’s newspapers, The Times, the New York Post and the Daily News, all carried stories with Day Two follow-ups on Tuesday, suggesting that Garden officials were considering banning future games because of what happened. The orders from Tweed came down fast: Next year’s games will be held during the day and only students, staff and family members of the competing schools will be able to buy tickets. This logic is easy to follow for parents and educators: If one of your children/students misbehaves, you punish them all, right?
So, because of the actions of a relatively small number of mostly young men and women lacking any self-control, the town was talking about the troublemakers, not the 14,000 law-abiding parents, family and friends of the players from places like East New York, Brownsville and Kingsbridge who spent a wonderful day watching four outstanding basketball games. We were bemoaning the fact that this could happen in our city. One TV commentator was so flummoxed that he asked: “What is happening to our kids?”
The TV guy posed the wrong question. He should have asked what is happening to the news coverage — including his station’s — of an entire city? Sadly, the thousands of kids, parents and supporters who were at the Garden that day got lumped together with a couple of hundred troublemakers. Worse, future high school basketball players lose because they may not have the Garden next year.
The sensationalizing decision-makers at news stations — if it bleeds, it leads — were having a field day with the footage of the unruly miscreants, not the 14,000 fans and certainly not the student athletes who behaved professionally and played their hearts out on the Garden floor. Let’s face it, who cares about four basketball teams from the city’s poorer neighborhoods? Are they really that important?
The answer was found the next day. Some papers didn’t even carry the score of the game in their “news” articles. The TV coverage was also abysmal, leaving viewers to ask: By the way, who won?
[Our coverage of the championship games appears on page 40.]
Does any of this matter in the larger scheme of things? Yes, it does.
The extensive coverage of a small band of ruffians was allowed to overshadow the larger “news” story, thereby adding to the stereotypes that too many New Yorkers have of young black and Hispanic men and women.
The high school players are coached by UFT members who, by all accounts, have life-changing impact on many of their students. They not only coach a sport, they are role models, mentors, college advisors and sometimes surrogate parents. Like art and music teachers and virtually all the educators who work in the city’s public school system, they unselfishly give of themselves to shape the lives of our 1.1 million children.
The fact that none of this was covered, that none of us saw any of the championship players on the news and that we didn’t see the smiling faces of proud parents is a journalistic disgrace.
