Biased views when reporting sports

By: Hannah Pickett

In class discussion earlier this week, we discussed the importance of being completely objective, impartial, and unbiased when reporting a story. If a writer writes with an opinion, he/she is no longer reporting the facts of the story.

So, I got thinking about this when I was writing my articles for the Winterset Madisonian, and realized that when writing sports stories, we are not objective about the situation at all. Winterset's football team is struggling to say the least, yet every week I manage to put some sort of positive spin on things.

In fact, I actually tell our writers to make sure the team we cover (Winterset, Earlham, and I-35) sound somewhat decent. According to our text and class discussion, what we do in the sports department of the Winterset Madisonian is far from journalistic.

When does it become alright to go beyond reporting just the facts, especially in sports, and put a positive spin on the situation to suit the demographic?