Sports News: Step Away from the Penn State Situation!

I love sports. I watch it, read about it, following certain writers around the country. I DVR sports shows, set up Twitter as a sports news feed, and I use a sports talk radio app as an alarm to wake up in the morning. And I hate sports talk radio.

I'm emotionally invested in sports. I yell, scream, clap, sweat, pace, worry, all within the confines of my home. I think about sports issues sometimes, and love to talk about it with other people.

And at a very irregular pace, I even come to BleacherReport.com and write about it.

But I know that sports isn't life and doesn't really matter. Emotionally I take it seriously, but intelligently I realize its lack of significance in life.

What happened at Penn State matters. It's serious. Crimes against children? As serious as it gets. An institution that may have covered it up? That's real life drama.

Which is why I want the sports media to stay out of it. 

This is real life and your job does not involve real life.

In terms of a newspaper, a story like Penn State is on the front page. The sports section is three or four sections back. There's a reason for that: Sports news isn't as important, and therefore isn't covered as such.

Just because it happened with the football program doesn't mean sports media gets to do investigative reporting of the crimes, or talk this out so that we can try to come to grips with this on a social level.

Stay out of it, sports media. Stick to the sports stories associated with this, and leave the rest of it to the people who cover the real news.

I don't need Gary the Sports Ox giving me his obvious take on child abuse. 

I don't need Jack & Jill in the Morning to try and explain what this says about us as a people.

Stick with injury reports and meaningless predictions and keys to the game, and leave this Penn State situation alone.

I opened my Twitter this morning to see what happened with the NBA negotiations last night, and it's loaded with sports people commenting on everything Penn State: the riots, the crimes, the university.

As I comb through the tweets looking for NBA news, I see two different tweets saying that CNN was killing ESPN on the coverage of the Penn State campus.

No kidding! Maybe that's because they are a real news organization! Of course they know how to cover it better than a sports network.

This is not a knock on sports journalism. There are people that I really enjoy reading. There are people who have made a really good living from it, and have done more with it than I will probably ever do with my own life.

Sometimes sports news intersects with real life, and a good story can be written to examine that aspect. But not a whole network. Not around the clock.

Sports is not real news. It's entertainment news. What happened at Penn State is real news. Anything beyond the sports angles should be covered by credible news people.

And why, exactly, are people turning to ESPN to watch this unfold, anyway? Why are people, who are so outraged by this that they have a need to call a radio show, dialing the number to a sports station?

What happened is as serious and as horrible as life gets. And it should be covered by somebody more credible that Stuart Scott.

When I want real news coverage, I'll turn to real news people, not people who's shows include gongs and song parodies. Most audio and visual sports medias are built around hyperbole, and that is something that isn't needed with this story.

So please, sports media, do what you do best: Talk about the things that bring a little escapism from the rigors of day-to-day life, a distraction from the darkness in stories such as Penn State. I need you for that. Stop butchering this already-bad situation. 

Compare Eli Manning to Tom Brady. Prognosticate the impact the NBA lockout will have on the fan base. Use words like "prognosticate" to try and make the unimportant topics you cover sound important. 

Just leave the Penn State tragedy alone. Let those who are qualified to cover this important event do so.