Two Reasons Why Sports Journalism Rules

An interesting meta-post on 538.com this morning about the media. Of particular note is Nate's condemnation of the MSM for verifying it's sources (reproduced below). Nate, a former sabermetrician working in baseball and now a massively renowned political statistician, lauds Sports Illustrated as being the most thorough fact-checker of the dozen-or-so news producers for whom he's worked.

CBS's underlying problem -- and the commonality between the three items that I described above -- is the arbitrary and largely ineffectual nature of the fact-checking process employed by the mainstream media. I have written for perhaps a dozen major publications over the span of my career, and the one with the most thorough fact-checking process is by some margin Sports Illustrated. Although this is an indication of the respect with which SI accords its brand, it does not speak so well of the mainstream political media that you are more likely to see an unverified claim repeated on the evening news than you are to see in the pages of your favorite sports periodical.

Is this shocking? I actually think not so much. I was listening to a show on NPR (maybe TOTN, or Day-to-Day) once last year when someone suggested that newsmagazines and such should broadcast the clear factual mistakes they make on the air. To my great joy, one of the interviewees responded by saying that the only show he knew of that did this was ESPN's Pardon The Interruption.