The Decline of the American Sportswriter

My post below about Mike Timlin and the Boston sportswriter got me thinking about sportswriting in general. In the old days, we used to think of sportswriters as crusty, wise-cracking cynics — a breed apart from journalists, and suckers for no one’s ideology. However, too many of today’s sportswriters seem at least as inclined to political correctness and unthinking liberalism as regular journalists. Why the change? I think it has somehing to do with the decline of individualism in our society. It seems to me that many sportswriters today don’t want to be a breed apart. They want to be like the real journalists on the newspaper. That desire, plus a sense of intellectual inferiority, causes too many of them to mimic the views of regular reporters and columnists. And because they know less about public affairs, their commentary on these matters tends to be more vacuous than what one reads in other sections of the newspaper.