Some things in life are inevitable. As hard as anyone may try, everything ends up happening the way it is intended to happen.
In sports, losing is one of those things that is often unavoidable. It’s a part of the game. It happens.
As much as we’d all like to think it is possible, no one person or team can win all of the time. That doesn’t happen.
Now, you have the choice to deal with a loss as you wish.
You could cry about it, but my advice is to get over it.
In journalism, however, there is no choice.
The job of a journalist is to be accurate, honest and present the facts.
Although it may not be the desired outcome, sports teams inevitably lose.
So when the fact of the matter is that a team lost, there is no way for a journalist to avoid saying just that.
So how do you write an article that makes the team sound as good as they usually are, or as good as they can be or as good as they should be?
These questions warrant three simple answers: you don’t… you can’t… and we won’t.
Journalist write about the facts that are presented in front of them.
They must give an accurate description of the actions they have witnessed.
If the game doesn’t happen to be the best game ever played, a journalist has the right to say that.
Putting a loss in a positive light is called public relations and it has no place in a newspaper.
Reporters are normally not trying to put down the athletes, teams or their skills when they write articles.
In any athletic contest, there is one winner. That means the other team loses. There is no two ways around it.
There is usually no hidden agenda or malicious intent to mar the name of an athlete or team in an article.
Journalists are simply providing unbiased coverage of an event; that’s their job.
Recently this almost blunt cruelty was misconstrued as a lack of school spirit for the University of La Verne.
But that is far from the truth.
As much as the staff and I love to write great things about our home teams, there are boundaries and responsibilities we have to follow.
We can only do so when the opportunity arises.
It’s nothing personal, so don’t take it that way.
Chrissy Zehrbach, a junior journalism major, is sports editor for the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at sqweet@aol.com.
