After news broke Monday about a COVID-19 outbreak on the Miami Marlins, Kyle Brandt of the NFL Network tweeted:

There’s a segment of the NFL media that seems to be almost rooting for COVID to affect the season. They want it.

They see the Marlins news and say, “Yep! Lots of luck, football!”

These are people who make their livings off football.

I don’t get it.
— Kyle Brandt (@KyleBrandt) July 27, 2020

It’s not an uncommon sentiment. It’s one that’s shared by the guy who runs that “sports media” website named for a football term that I’m not going to link to or identify because his ideas are wrong and dangerous and don’t deserve to be amplified.

Brandt’s Tweet brought a response from Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic:

This is still happening? The idea that a media member who appropriately scrutinizes how a sport would work in the middle of a pandemic is rooting against it? The dumbest sports media take of 2020 is still going strong. There's gotta be an easier way to cheerlead a sport than this https://t.co/zIu6jI5Hhe
— Mike Vorkunov (@MikeVorkunov) July 27, 2020

This debate sits at the heart of one the core debates about sports journalism and sports media’s identity. Does it exist to celebrate and promote spots? Or does it celebrate to cover it in a fair and accurate manner? I wrote about this in my dissertation and on this site several years ago:

Robert McChesney wrote that sports coverage became important to newspapers in large part because sports is ideologically safe — it doesn’t offend people, boosts civic pride and contributes to the perceived well-being of a community. This ideological safety, however, runs counter to the self-perceived role of traditional news journalism. This leads news journalists to view sports journalism as mere entertainment, not “real journalism.”. Where news journalism has its roots in the idea of being the fourth-estate and the public watchdog on public officials, sports journalism’s roots are far more promotional. James Michener wrote that “One of the happiest relationships in American society is between sports and the media” (p. 355). In the 19th century, media played a critical role in making sport both an acceptable social institution and a popular commercial one

This is the balance every sports journalist faces in their career. We get in sports journalism primarily because we grow up sports fans. We like sports. We like watching it, writing about it, talking about it. We earn a living because sports exists. So how do we collectively balance our genuine excitement about sports with our journalistic responsibilities? How do we balance “YAY SPORTS ARE BACK!” with “Is it really smart to try to play sports while a global pandemic continues unchecked?”

It’s not an either-or situation. Multiple things can be true at the same time, and as Will Leitch wrote, it is responsible to hold both ideas at the same time.

But the debate about sports journalism’s role - cheerleader or reporter - is embedded in historical DNA of sports media.