It’s almost impossible to pick up the paper, listen to the radio or scroll through your twitter feed without seeing\u00a0 something about an athlete running afoul of the law…Never mind who’s suing who or who’s being suspended…So it’s important for those who work in the sports journalism world to at least have a working knowledge of the laws that help regulate contracts, broadcast rights and the morass that is the NCAA, for example…<\/p>\n
Who better to help us wade through all this at the semester’s finale of the Boston University Sports Journalism Seminar Series than Michael McCann<\/a>, the Associate Dean of the University of New Hampshire Law School and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and SI.Com…McCann was joined by long time media columnist Chad Finn<\/a> of the Boston Globe, a great pairing….<\/p>\n Athletes acting badly is not anything new…It’s more a case of people finding out about it…The immediacy of uploading a pic or a video is all too commonplace (see Michael Phelps<\/a>) …Tweeting out news, good or bad, has made us a lot more aware but also a lot of people very wealthy…The appetite for this kind of news seems over the top but as we talked about in a previous seminar this semester, Sports and Society, athletes as a whole aren’t that different from any other segment of the population…”The data doesn’t show that, said MCann, look at the NFL, maybe one percent, if that, make headlines.\u00a0 They’re the same as other groups (in society).”<\/p>\n McCann has written and followed some of the highest profile cases lately…We couldn’t go a day without reading about Deflategate here in New England…He turned that into a semester long course at UNH…McCann has taken on the NCAA a number of times and is now writing about the “pay for play” issue and is about to embark on a case of a family suing for injuries due to CTE\u00a0…”It’s not enough to write about and fight for an issue from just the legal point of view,\u00a0 the moral point of view, what’s right, is just as important”, stated MCann…<\/p>\n Finn finds himself thrown into this world almost every time he writes…While much of what he does centers around the local sports media scene, he bristles at the term “critic”…”I don’t like that term, said Finn, I’m not just commenting, I’m writing content pieces as well.”…\u00a0 Don’t tell that to the boys at the sports talk radio stations in town….They excoriate Finn for his opinions on a regular basis…As Finn told us, “controversy resonates”, a not so subtle reference to the “fellowship of the miserable” Rick Pitino talked about more than twenty five years ago…The STR guys just don’t like it when Finn points out how low they stoop…He does offer this however, “I try to keep my personal bias out of the pieces (I write). I was taught to sometimes agree with both sides of an issue, I have to be detached”…In a very recent piece<\/a> about something as innocuous as ratings, Finn made a case for both sides winning yet took heat from virtually every show on the dial for simply stating the facts…<\/p>\n Journalism students are usually required to take a course in Media Law and Ethics…Sports Journalism Students should probably take a Sports Law<\/a> class as well (or perhaps petition to replace)…Here’s a suggestion, when someone asks what you want for graduation, how about suggesting\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The Oxford Handbook of American Sports Law<\/a> ?…Not exactly light summer beach reading but you might learn a thing or two along the way (and strengthen those arms as well!)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s almost impossible to pick up the paper, listen to the radio or scroll through your twitter feed without seeing\u00a0 something about an athlete running afoul of the law…Never mind who’s suing who or who’s being suspended…So it’s important for those who work in the sports journalism world to at least have a working knowledge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":491,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions\/491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}