By April, Dohrmann had become convinced that no other reporter was pushing the tattoo parlor angle far enough, so he flew to Columbus and began asking questions. On May 27, a Friday, Dohrmann phoned Ohio State with the allegations his reporting had turned up: that, going back to 2002, significantly more players than had been reported had traded memorabilia for tattoos, including nine who were currently on the team. On Sunday, the university responded to Dohrmann with a statement from athletic director Gene Smith that distanced the school from Tressel. The next day, Tressel resigned.
Dohrmann’s scoop earned him plaudits from the sports journalism community at large, but there were detractors. Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs and Fox Sports’s Jason Whitlock, both outspoken critics of the NCAA generally—Craggs has prophesied its ultimate demise—and of the Scandal Beat specifically, publicly attacked the SI exposé. Whitlock, fomenting on Twitter, called it a “typical slave-catcher investigation,” and mocked what he perceived to be Dohrmann’s and Sports Illustrated’s efforts to take credit for Tressel’s firing. Craggs, in a blog post, said Dohrmann represented a “passel of excellent journalists” who had “turned themselves once again into mall cops for the NCAA.”
Dohrmann doesn’t see it quite that way. “If he means we go get things the NCAA’s enforcement staff doesn’t, he is correct,” Dohrmann says. “If he feels that we are doing the NCAA’s job, this would be like saying The New York Times is the Justice Department’s mall cop.”
Still, Dohrmann has his own misgivings about the Scandal Beat. “Of course the NCAA can change and it does change slightly, and stories that show wrongdoing force small changes,” he says. “Now, every compliance arm in the country is dealing with tattoos. When I wrote about academic fraud in Minnesota, I am sure every school in the country tightened up its academic counseling department. Small changes occur because of the scandal. Are there macro changes, like paying athletes, because enough of these scandals get broken? It is possible. I just have no faith.”
Beyond the Scandal Beat
The paradox that Dohrmann describes—he both defends the work and acknowledges its limitations in getting at the underlying problems—came up time and again in my conversations with Scandal Beat writers.
Rick Telander, the Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist whose 1989 book, The Hundred Yard Lie, argued that big-time college football should remove its threadbare veil of amateurism, puts a finer point on the discrepancy, calling the rules violations the “crumbs of the problem.” He says: “The big muffin is right in front of us every day. We know it and accept it, so that’s where all the craziness starts. We accept the Big Lie, so we are dazzled and amazed by the little lies. I have found that completely self-defeating and really it hasn’t changed.”
In this way, the Scandal Beat sets its own trap. It produces important stories that fit into a celebrated tradition of muckraking and watchdog reporting. They are the kinds of stories that win prizes and generate traffic. Most of the reporters who do them have been reared in an industry whose professional code demands “objectivity,” a sort of bloodless presentation of the facts that, at its worst, can reduce an obvious injustice to a he said, she said cop-out. The result is straightforward coverage of the NCAA and its rules—and the inevitable violations of those rules—rather than coverage that challenges the validity of the rules themselves, and the system that upholds them.
There are journalistic efforts to come at the ills of college athletics from the less sensational but potentially more fruitful direction of economic justice. For about five years, the Indianapolis Star’s investigative reporter Mark Alesia covered the NCAA, which is based in Indianapolis, as a quasi-beat, tailoring his focus to the underlying economic issues, as opposed to matters of enforcement. In 2006, he wrote a series of stories that scrutinized the astounding fact that less than 1 percent of the NCAA’s athletes produce more than 90 percent of its revenue.
On the subject of watchdog journalism, Bob Gibson, Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, recently said: “If we don’t have a watchdog function, then we have a lapdog function, and that doesn’t serve the voter very well. We need journalism that goes out and challenges what is being given reporters as the facts. We need to look behind the facts and find out where they’re coming from, and what the interests are of the people who are giving us those facts. Local government and state government and the federal government today are even more than ever in the news business themselves. They are putting out news as if it was the entire package and expecting people to buy it and I think Americans have to be a little bit skeptical and have to look behind where those governments are putting out facts.” (Gibson appeared on the Charlottesville, VA, interview program Politics Matters with host Jan Paynter discussing journalism http://bit.ly/pm-gibson)
#1 Posted by Politics Matters, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 01:25 PM
I believe you incorrectly characterized the Ohio State investigation. There were allegations of sweetheart auto deals, but they were disproven. Most of Dohrmann's supposed allegations of more players being involved were directly refuted, with Dohrmann clinging to an anonymous source that wouldn't even talk to the NCAA. Since when is one anonymous source without corroboration sufficient to verify a story that drags people through the mud?
Your story here is part of the problem. One media outlet just repeats what another says without fact checking of their own, and false allegations become the accepted "truth" of the situation. Everybody is so anxious to get a scoop that nobody seems to care if it is actually true. Web site hits and copies sold have replaced journalistic ethics.
#2 Posted by Brian, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 05:42 PM
The University of Wisconsin football "program" has always congratulated itself on developing its own players but this fall the Badgers' starting quarterback is a 22-year-old college graduate and professional baseball player who was developed somewhere else. Russell Wilson bailed out at North Carolina State University, where he starred for three years and earned a baccalaureate degree, with one year of football eligibility left. Effectively a free agent, he was hotly recruited by both Auburn and Wisconsin, which got the nod largely because Wilson was awed by its imposing offensive line. The Wilson situation is a breath-taking example of the cynicism and hypocrisy of big-time college football but since it involves no infraction of NCAA rules, not an eyebrow has been raised by the sports press in Madison--or anywhere else, for that matter. It may be true that the Scandal Beat reporters you write about focus on crumbs and ignore the muffin, as Rick Telander puts it, but an even bigger problem is that the football-crazy public in general and alumni fans in particular think the muffin is finger-lickin' good. The commercialization and corporatization of college sports, the huge amounts of money involved and the slick marketing campaigns have made athletic departments bigger than the schools they represent. The tail is wagging the dog and except for a few spoilsport jounalists hardly anyone sees anything wrong with that. Just win, baby! Wisconsin's hired gun from North Carolina will play only one season in Madison but if he takes his fellow "student athletes" to a big bowl game or, who knows, a national championship, he'll go down as the greatest Badger athlete who never set foot in a UW undergraduate classroom.
#3 Posted by Jim Doherty, CJR on Wed 14 Sep 2011 at 03:06 PM
I have known several world-class musicians who have been recruited to university music schools with offers of full scholarship plus expenses (essentially the same deal that scholarship varsity athletes receive).
These young musicians are not only allowed, but encouraged, to take as many outside, paid performance jobs as they can handle. Indeed, I knew some who played in the local symphony, at full wages, while they were in school.
Why is it acceptable for an oboe player but not a football, basketball or tennis player, who is not allowed any outside income, even unrelated to the sport, while making considerable income for the university?
Never made any sense to me.
Why is it alright for the oboe player to
#4 Posted by efgoldman, CJR on Sat 17 Sep 2011 at 10:26 PM
Thank you for questioning Dohrmann and his ridiculous reporting. SI treats him like Woodward and Bernstein when in reality he totally misses the real story.
#5 Posted by Richard verbit, CJR on Tue 20 Sep 2011 at 07:41 PM
Well this wasn't the first coincidence of scandals in football history. Just lately we had the president and head coach of a school get fired for something as such. It makes you think twice about putting on their football uniforms.
#6 Posted by Kelly, CJR on Tue 3 Jan 2012 at 12:25 PM