Sports and Politics

Many people like to just get sports when they read the sports section. Politics should be for the front section or the opinion page. Even bloggers like The Baseball Crank debate whether they should have two separate blogs (one for baseball and one for politics) to keep things pure. It seems to me that normally it is the more conservative writers who are concerned with being able to compartmentalize. The liberal writers seem blissfully unaware when they weave politics into their sports writing (as if they expected everyone who reads them to have the same political beliefs).

Take for example today's Boston Globe sports section. There is an article on the Democratic Convention in Boston this summer and by my count 14 people are mentioned in the article. The only person with a sports connection is Celtic great Bill Russell - yet this winds up in the sports section?

Also in today's Globe sports section is a column on tonight's women's NCAA championship game between UConn and Tennessee. The article is by Susan Bickelhaupt of the Globe staff and starts off, "The Democrats have a move to elect "Anybody But Bush" in an effort to take over the White House. And a lot of women's basketball fans might have had similar thinking when they watched the NCAA Tournament semifinals: 'Anybody but Connecticut and Tennessee.'"

In the Globe - the line "Anybody but Bush" gets by the editors without a second thought but if Bickelhaupt had written something like, "The number one ranking in women's college basketball has flip-flopped between UConn and Tennessee more often than John Kerry's positions on Iraq" - I have no doubt that some editor would have chastised Bickelhaupt for dragging politics into sports.

Many people have learned to just gloss over these obvious political biases but it is still fun to point them out if only to hear people try and say that a liberal bias does not exist in the media.