OutKick's Clay Travis defends sports reporter who admitted to making up reports
Travis: “Let's be honest — there's hardly any actual journalists in sports”
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From the November 17, 2023, edition of OutKick's OutKick the Show
CLAY TRAVIS (HOST): Why does the Charissa Thompson story become a big one? I think because deep down massive amounts of sports media members are super insecure about what they do for a living. And I get it. You're a grown up who writes about what happens in games or talks about what happens in games for a living and if you really consider yourself to be a journalist. Is this what you went to journalism school for? To write about whether someone is gonna play with a sprained ankle or not? I mean, that's fun but it's frivolous right? Sports is the toy chest of life. And so, I think there are a lot of sports journalists that are super insecure about their job and let's be honest — there's hardly any actual journalists in sports. And I'm not talking — I'm an opinion guy right? Sometimes I break news, most of the time I just give you my opinion you can agree or disagree with it. How many people are breaking stories that would otherwise not exist but for their work in the world of sports? Almost no one. And this is important and consequential. I started talking about the ‘big Js' a long time ago when I started OutKick. The ‘big J' journalists who wanted to argue that sports journalism is really important. It matters if you break a news story first but only in my opinion, if the story would otherwise not exist. Breaking a story about where a free agent is going, it's fun, it matters, it certainly can be lucrative, but that's not really breaking news to me. To me, journalistically breaking news is ‘if we hadn't done this investigation this story would've never happened.' Where a free agent signs, whether a guy's got a torn ACL or not, those are not to me, sports journalism stories in the traditional context because it's going to get out, right? The team's gonna announce it. Sooner or later, everybody is gonna know what's going on there. To me, the actual journalism story is one that somebody gets that otherwise would not have been public. Can you name to me, a sports story that got out in sports journalism that otherwise would not have occurred this year that was consequential? I can't even think of one.