Glorified Bottom Feeders

Photo credit: "Vacuum!!!" by Benson Kua (Creative Commons)

“Glorified, privileged bottom feeders. Never forget that is what we are.”  

This is what I used to teach aspiring movie journalists and critics, in my previous life covering the international film industry for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, Screen International and Cineuropa.org.

For a long time I loved writing about films, the people who made them, and how they made them. But I’d also double down on the point that when writing about someone else’s talent, take your job much more seriously than you take yourself.

I want to extend this advice to sports journalists. Because the overlap is glaring.

While you can argue about the need for the press to cover these fields and their players (literal and figurative), unless you’ve experienced the press conference circuit, I think it’s impossible to imagine the vanity, self-importance and posturing that takes place.

I’m referring to the journalists. Too many of whom get confused by their proximity to fame and/or greatness, and start to act as if they’re equally famous and great. They will say, openly and without any irony, that they are gatekeepers of talent or culture, and that the public relies on them.

As if typing up one’s impressions of a match or a movie takes the same skill, drive and training as playing or making one does.  

Rather than discussing Naomi Osaka’s mental health issues, we should be wondering how any athlete can talk to a bunch of strangers, some of whom know hardly anything about their sport, without getting irritated, frustrated or demoralized.

The way they have to answer to the press is relentless, and absurd. Actors and filmmakers get to do it after they’ve finished a movie. Athletes must do it in real time.

Imagine if Nicole Kidman had to explain to a journalist why she did or didn’t nail a particular scene — right after she shot it. Imagine if she had to that every day on set.

Imagine your own job, and having to get a performance review after every significant task you complete, by people who have never done your job.

“Susan, you’re the company’s best accountant, but in today’s memo about next week’s quarterly report, you added some numbers incorrectly. Why do you think you did that? Your co-worker Rosario’s math was perfect. Why do you think that was, and how does that make you feel? Do you think you’ll be more focused for next week’s report, or do you think that one will be incorrect as well? Also, tell us about this new person you’re dating. And what it feels like to be the second Black, gay accountant at your firm. What sets you apart from the first?”

This is what a press conference sounds like so much of the time, and it’s lazy and short-sighted to say that it’s part of an athlete’s job to put up with that. They can and do promote themselves and their sport, when they’re not in the middle of playing it. And that should be enough.

Yet sadly, as Jonathan Liew writes in The Guardian, the world’s best athletes still feel beholden to roomfuls of middle-aged men, even though said men ”are no longer the power.”

Hallelujah to more people recognizing that, because clearly they still have too much power if Osaka is going it alone. If she, not they, had to take a time-out.

I know it’s hard on the ego to be a glorified bottom feeder, even if you don’t admit it to yourself. And that it’s hard to be around people known across the planet for what they do, while if you’re known at all, it’s also because of what they do.

But if you cover sporting or cultural events, isn’t that your job?