I'm not taking sides either way but I just want to share a story from the season before last in our little hometown newspaper. The town has a population of about 15000 and the game was 4A Varsity boys. The hometeam got beaten badly and the reporter interviewed the "star" player after the game as part of an article covering the game. During the entire interview the player complained about bad officiating and said that that was the reason they lost the game. He said that they couldn't compete "5 players against 7." (The game was called 2-person) Well, it was one thing for the player to say things like this but totally another thing for the paper to print it. But print it it did-- in its entirety. The manure hit the fan when the paper came out. The coach apologized in the next issue and the paper made some minor apologetic type statement about how those particular statements got overlooked while the article was being printed. The whole thing died down as quickly as it started but I just thought this might be an interesting story to add to the discussion on sports journalism.
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