Media Strike Out   

Journalists didn’t deliver the full message about the baseball talks.

"Who says they don't listen to the fans?" ESPN anchor Linda Cohn asked rhetorically at the top of the "SportsCenter" broadcast, just hours after baseball players and owners reached a labor agreement.

Both sides may have heard the fans. But clearly they didn't get the entire message. And that's in large part because the messenger misrepresented it.

In the wake of the baseball settlement, the sports media consensus has been that public anger was the most important element in bringing the bitter adversaries together. But the media may have played an even greater role. Depending on what team you root for, the press either saved the season or prevented the sport from adequately addressing competitive balance.

From the beginning, the almost unanimous media narrative was that a strike was the worst-case scenario for baseball. Yet, for fans of almost half the franchises, a much worse scenario was a deal that did not deal with the fact that their teams cannot afford success.

Typical of the coverage was ESPN.com's breathless lead after the strike settlement: "The games will go on!" Another ESPN baseball reporter summed up the media view by heralding: "Any deal is a good deal." This even though most experts say that the agreement doesn't address the sport's most significant problem: the glaring revenue disparity among teams.

Throughout the summer, the press told people--and told them and told them--that a strike would be a slap in their faces. Papers reinforced that point, playing big photos of game spectators carrying "If you strike, I'll strike" signs. But did anyone ever ask the fans whether they would accept some interruption to make the game more competitive?

The media didn't give the public enough credit. Instead, they patronizingly mounted the high horse, exemplified nicely in a New York Post editorial: "For the average Joe, of course, the details aren't nearly as important as the fact that teams took the field yesterday."

And when the press actually deemed to ask average Joes, they didn't portray their answers accurately. The cover flap of Sports Illustrated read: "SI Fans Poll: 'We won't come back.' " Inside was a photo montage of those fans with signs and this cutline: "The message to their heroes was loud and clear." Buttressing that contention was a CNNSI.com online poll that found that 66 percent of the public would no longer be interested in baseball if this year's postseason was canceled.

The same survey indicated that 70 percent of the public believed the game would benefit from revenue sharing, a luxury tax or both. But that didn't even make the magazine story. The fans were sending out a nuanced message. But it got lost in black-and-white coverage.

The message appeared to be: "Don't strike" and "Fix the system." Yet players and owners only got half of that from the coverage. Why? Maybe because most of the media honestly thought that avoiding a strike was in the sport's best interest--and their own.

And the press might also have felt a well-meaning but misguided responsibility to force the parties together on behalf of the public.

But the press could have--and should have--argued that a settlement that did not adequately address competitive balance might not be worth making. And that a Band-Aid is counterproductive when one needs major surgery.

The press made it seem as if baseball fans were a monolithic group. In reality, people's hometown stadium--or at least the team they root for--dictated where they stood on the negotiations. In New York, the headquarters for much of the media, revenue sharing is viewed as a nuisance on the way to another Yankee World Series appearance. But elsewhere around the country, like in Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Miami, it's a key to whether the local team can compete.

But the press never portrayed a strike as a part of a natural economic restructuring; it was always Armageddon. By spotlighting only the most activist, angry fans, the sign-wielders, the media made it almost impossible for the two sides to stop the game--even if that was the way to address the sport's fundamental and complex economic problems.

Who remembered to mention that the two most successful sports league--the National Football League and National Basketball Association--endured player strikes to get their financial houses in order?

The media were so concerned about keeping action on the field that they missed a chance to tell the public whether that action would be worth watching.