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  • The blurred line of fan journalism


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    Anyone who has ever tried searching for news about Canadian soccer on the Internet knows that MLS receives by far the most regular coverage in print media. Just this week there were stories filed on the Whitecaps preseason , the Redbulls visit to Montreal , and Dwayne de Rosario welcoming his new Dutch overlords with open arms (meanwhile the only national news came by way of the National Post’s Financial section, with a story on how the CSA got some money back from would-be sponsor Hyundai).

    It makes sense; local papers, save for a few notable exceptions (I’m looking at you Edmonton Journal, at least sometimes), have no incentive to cover the national team set-up. Meanwhile the two Canadian “national” newspapers—the Post and the Globe and Mail—are more known for their right and middle-right (respectively) op-eds on the importance of fiscal conservatism than their wide-ranging sports coverage, so covering the men's and women's teams isn't high on the priority list.

    That leaves independent, fan-driven online sites to regularly cover the Canadian men and women’s soccer teams and fill in the news gap. Chances are if you’re reading this column, you already bookmarked those sites ages ago. Unlike newspaper journalists, the incentive for an independent site to cover the CMNT and CWNT isn’t money, it’s personal interest, i.e. fandom. One might assume there would be a “conflict of interest” when fans are entrusted to write objectively about their sport. Yet as you know, Canadian soccer supporters tend to ask the hard questions, maintain a critical eye to their national team, include a daunting amount of details in articles, and dig a lot deeper into things like governance and funding disputes at the administrative level, areas of news that put a lot of sports desk editors to sleep.

    These are all good things, but Canadian soccer bloggers are also Canadian soccer fans. As such they tend to share or at least empathize with the sentiments typical among football supporters. One of them involves player loyalty, as we saw this week with the injury to USMNT-capped, once would-be Canadian national team player Teal Bunbury.

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    Back in November, Benjamin Massey penned a well-researched, expertly-reasoned and all-around objective article on Bunbury’s decision to play for the US over Canada which casually included this caveat:

    Bunbury is, of course, a soccer traitor, and I hope he suffers a catastrophic career-ending injury as soon as possible. But it's nothing personal; strictly business. The Americans have called up Bunbury to make sure the Canadians can't get him even if it's terrible for his career. I merely want the reverse.
    Massey was merely being honest, as were a lot of other Canadian soccer writers and supporters were this week when they reacted to news of Bunbury’s elbow knack: they didn’t feel particularly bad about it, and some even abused the Buddhist concept “karma” in saying so. The reaction of fans sparked a bit of a backlash last week from a prominent national soccer writer which took a holier-than-thou attitude about fans wishing harm to a player, which Duane Rollins last week criticized as disingenuous “moral outrage.”

    But there is another issue here, over whether Canadian soccer bloggers' sympathy with CMNT fans' reaction to Bunbury's injury constitutes some sort of breach of journalistic integrity. The answer I think is no, as Massey’s article demonstrates. First of all, sports is by its very nature partisan, like politics. But unlike politics, serious sports bloggers (i.e. the ones worth reading) tend to much more objective than their ideological counterparts. They don’t to go easy on their team, and try to avoid becoming flag-waving sycophants. They want to know as much as humanly possible about players, wages, stadium deals, whatever, and unless they are delusional, they also can sympathize (on paper) with players who grew up in Minnesota their whole lives and chose to play for the U.S. But they can also reserve the right to empathize in print with the sentiment of fellow supporters who express not-a-little schadenfreude at Bunbury’s poor luck, while not sharing it explicitly in print.

    For a prominent Canadian sports journalist, at an established media giant, to criticize Canadian soccer fans for essentially being fans, in a media environment that ignores Canadian soccer to an unbelievable degree in comparison to other countries with our level of participation in the sport, is particularly galling. It is also an indirect attack on the many hardworking, un-or-low-paid writers for whom Canadian soccer is both their passion and their subject as sports journalists.

    When the Canadian sports media takes ownership of their appalling ignorance about Canadian soccer, then they can lecture to fans and bloggers on what is acceptable in football fandom and what isn't.

    Richard Whittall writes on football from his hovel in Toronto, Canada. In addition to A More Splendid Life, he also writes the Canadian Soccer history blog, The Spirit of Forsyth. He is the associate editor of Tom Dunmore's award-winning Pitch Invasion. And his writing has appeared in Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and he was a contributor for Brooks Peck's Yahoo! blog Dirty Tackle for the 2010 World Cup. His columns on media and football will appear weekly on Canadian Soccer News. Follow him on Twitter @RWhittall



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