SA rugby media bias: Fact or fiction?

I’ve only been involved with professional rugby journalism for just over a year, and one of the urban legends that I’ve picked up on my travels is that there is a bubbling (nothing too discernable) feeling from a section of rugby followers that media coverage in South Africa is biased in favour of certain teams, depending on geographical location and ownership.

Let me just say from the outset that the classical assumption that journalists are meant to be 100% objective is flawed.

Journalists, like everyone else, are raised via a particular background, with certain beliefs, and with certain ideologies. By the time ‘we’ (I use that word very loosely) get to the point where copy is circulated to a wider audience, such as Sports Leader, those ideologies, while morphed or changed over time, do still exist.

To simplify, to be 100% objective is impossible because, as people, the way we have been raised and the way we learn to communicate always comes from a particular point of view, whatever it may be, being our subjective backgrounds. How can journalists be entirely black-and-white objective if they are operate in a subjective world? Food for thought.

The way I see it, following from the above, is that while true objectivity is impossible, as journalists, we should be encouraged to be as objective as possible and try our damndest to be. It’s a sit-on-the-fence perspective perhaps, but from what I’ve been taught at an academic level versus what I’ve seen from a professional point of view, is that this idea seems to strike the best chord and helps me (I’m sure five different journalists will give you five similiar yet different answers) deal with the ambiguous nature of writing from a particular perspective.

Moving on from that slightly laborious but necessary introduction, are SA rugby readers getting a fair deal through the publications they read? I think looking at two sections of media will help simplify the answer to that question.

Firstly, rugby media in South Africa can be divided into two categories: regional and national. Regional papers, when talking about print, would include the the Cape Argus, The Star, the Mercury, Pretoria News and any other publication (or website for that matter) whose mandate only extends to rugby in a particular region of the country.

Regionally, the relationship between the media and the team involved I wouldn’t imagine to seek objectivity since, as a regional media entity, it can be assumed that their interests lie in promoting their regional side, since that is the team their audience follows. Sounds simple enough and, from the introduction I laid out, acceptable. Another reason is the link between operating versus instigating. More on that below.

The situation however gets a bit murky when the same writers from different regional papers also work for national media outlets, thereby exposing their work to a national audience. This is an area that from this perspective I find concerning.

From an ethical point of view, there is nothing wrong with writing for different publications. That is the nature of modern journalism. You can find South African rugby writing all over the web, and not just on exclusively South African websites.

What I do feel is prevalent in the industry at the moment is that certain franchises receive the lion’s share of media coverage as the next round of Super 14 games approaches. The reason this happens is that the rugby writing pool at a national level is only so big, and with the major media houses cutting back costs, it’s easier for them to often use the same sources from their regional outlets since they are already on contract or are familiar with the house leadership.

From that, my position follows along the lines that while the bias certainly exists, it can be traced to the structural layout of the rugby media landscape rather than the individual journalist. Journalists are given a particular mandate to follow, and as such operate within the boundaries set by their employers. Perhaps it is a case of the different rugby authorities and the media houses shaking hands behind closed doors, but such arrangements or unwritten rules wouldn’t surprise me but this isn’t proven at all. Just a hunch.

Modern journalism is suffering from the paradox of critical content versus economic objective. Critical journalism, the style of introspection that begs questions of those who should be held accountable for their positions and actions, isn’t good for business but on the other side of the coin, who will hire you if you are seen as an independent thinker or as someone who rocks the boat? Business is a big fan of stability.

It is a crisis that is stripping away the very essence of what it means to be a journalist, changing our role into distibutors rather than challengers. As soon as the media became big business, the noble ideals of engagement, accountability and informing the public were always going to be compromised by those who controlled the purse strings. To run a national media organisation or even a regional publication, a vast amount of money is required and more often than not, retail sales of a particular product simply don’t cut it. The advertising rand has become way more important today than the consumer’s rand ever was, due to the ridiculous difference in scale.

The content that media produce, from this perspective, is also flawed. The public more often than not are merely being told what the specific team tells the journalist at the weekly press conference, without challenging the point of view presented to them. Why they don’t can again be traced, in my opinion, to the relationship between the media owners and rugby sponsors.

SA’s rugby media are there to do a job, and that essentially is the problem. Do I feel a pang of hypocracy in saying this? Absolutely.

The above is my opinion, so what do you think?