For most of my sports journalism career, I covered high school sports.
Yes, I covered college basketball and minor-league baseball as my beats. But at both The Times Herald in Olean and the Press & Sun Bulletin in Binghamton, I spent as much time covering high school sports as those higher-profile beats. Whether it was Big 30 football or STAC baseball, at least 2-3 of my shifts each week in 10 years of sports journalism involved covering high schools.
For so many newspapers, high school sports is the lifeblood of the sports section. It’s what connects the paper to the community. Kids get their names in the paper, and man, that matters. My friend and mentor Mike Vaccaro has made this point ever since I’ve known him — when Derek Jeter won the World Series, Jeter’s mom didn’t clip Vac’s column from the Post and put it on her fridge. But if a kid helped Allegany-Limestone beat Cuba-Rushford in baseball, you can get that article went on his mom’s fridge (or, more modernly, was shared on Facebook).
It was commonplace to have parents complain about their kids’ teams not get as much coverage as they felt they should. Fielding those complaints and talking with angry parents is a part of the job.
But no one - not one parent in my 14 years as a journalist, in nearly 25 years in and around sports journalism — ever complained that the newspaper was covering their kid.
Until this thread on Sunday night.
Rattled. Was just accosted while taking photos at a baseball tournament in Mesa. Parents yelled for me to not take pictures of their kid. I agreed and asked which kid was theirs. They didn’t want to say and said if I did they would “kick my ass.” They yelled I was the fake
— Patrick Breen 📸🌵 (@pjbreenphoto) November 22, 2020
This goes beyond people complaining about liberal bias in the media - that accusation has been around my entire life. It goes beyond people complaining about their local paper - again, that’s always been a thing. It goes beyond the diminishing trust in our institutions.
As a culture, we’re going to be dealing with the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency for a long time. And this is one of the most insidious aspects of Trumpism, the casting of all news media as the enemy of the people — from the daily abuse that journalists (particularly females and BIPIOC reporters) take online, to the Capitol Gazette shooting.
If a journalist can’t take pictures of a high school game, then the connection between newspapers and their communities may be close to irrevocably broken.