Hon 3013 Week 3 - Enzensberger and Habermas

Sports Writing and the Impossibilities of Modern Media Manipulation

Enzensberger makes very interesting and repeated points about the abilities of media to manipulate a society. First among them is that as new media continues to open channels of two-way communication between producer and audience, the possibility of total and complete control of the media vanishes.

In his case he was referring a government's ability to use the media as a tool for manipulation, but it applies to every aspect of society as well. Enzensberger could see the shift coming in a time before the internet, a time when radio was still relevant, and a time when the number of television stations in most areas could be counted on one hand. If his assertion was true then, it is doubly so today.

So let's ignore all the political implications for a moment and examine his claims in a relatively harmless realm: sports writing, specifically baseball. For the majority of baseball's lifespan, information could only be disseminated through newspaper and radio. These are both forms of media that Enzensberger described as "means of distribution" rather than "means of communication." They operate as one-way systems; whatever information they present is all the reader or listener can receive with no way to interact with the producers.

In such a system, manipulation is quite possible. With baseball, it was manipulation without malicious intent but manipulation nonetheless. Sportswriters at major papers were the only voice for the general public when it came to baseball news, and their word was law. Progressive thinkers like Bill James, a founding father of sorts of baseball's statistical revolution, would never be able to find work at as a columnist because their thoughts were so against the prevailing sentiment of the times.

So they were forced to write independently. James self-published his Bill James Baseball Abstract starting in 1977, and in it one could find statistical breakdowns and conclusions about players and the game as a whole that would never appear in a newspaper.

But one could only find them if they knew where to look. James was, in the words of Enzesberger on page 107, "at best an amateur but not a producer." James was coming to find that what the general public thought about baseball wasn't correct, but the general public couldn't know this because of the manipulative distribution structure of the media.

Fast forward to today, a time of new media and no prevailing manipulation. (It is still important to note, as Enzensberge does, that all forms of media are manipulative. It is only when control can be exerted over the media or that all manipulation is directed towards a single end that it becomes problematic.) The new media explosion has made it possible for every kind of opinion on every kind of subject to easily reach the general public, and the general public can just as easily make a response to the producers.

The old baseball mindset of valuing RBIs, scrappy play, and Gold Gloves has mostly been relegated to sports writers for major papers. Bill James and countless others like him now have just as much of a say as they analyze new defensive metrics, evaluating pitching independent of defense, and determine proper values for offensive production.

Bert Blyleven, a major league pitcher from 1970-1992, is a perfect example of the effects of sports writing before and after the new media age. Over the course of his career in nearly 5000 inning pitched, Blyleven proved himself to be worth 90 Wins above Replacement, good for 13th all-time.

But the media didn't know what WAR was while he was a player. They didn't know, or chose not to report on, everything he was doing that set him apart as one of the best pitchers in the history of the game. They didn't say he was bad, but they certainly failed to properly recognize him.

That showed when it came time for Hall of Fame voting for Bert. He first appeared on the ballot in 1998, and any decently informed baseball fan of today would say he should have made it in on the first ballot. Yet he only received 17% of the vote, a far cry from the 75% required for election.

That number hardly rose until 2008, at which point the new media of the internet had established itself. Not only were the opinions of those that participated in new media being heard by the general public, they were heard by traditional sportswriters as well. Blyleven received 62%. 

This year, he was elected with 80% of the vote, finally recognized as an all-time great by sports writers. In a way, as far as baseball writing was concerned, this event signaled the death of media manipulation on the public. Thanks to blogs, twitter, and web-based television, media has become a wonderfully open and useful system.