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Of course, we all hate the fact that the print media do not give enough coverage to our sport, but let's compile a list of specific peeves about the way they cover it when they do. (I've limited this to print media because the way tv mangles T&F is a whole nother subject.)
My pet peeve is the placement of track & field news under the column heading "Olympic Sports" rather than under its own heading. That drives me crazy. Basketball is an Olympic sport. So are baseball, boxing, tennis, and soccer. They would never lump those sports in a miscellaneous category with fencing, archery, water polo, and other sports that almost nobody pays any attention to (even during the Olympics).
The evil of putting us under the "Olympic Sports" category is, of course, the implication that our sport has significance only once every four years, which of course is not true. But it becomes true in the eyes of the readers who are told that this is how their daily newspaper thinks of track and field.
We should all write to the editors of our local papers when we see this. It's bad journalism and it's harmful to our sport.
My pet peeve is the placement of track & field news under the column heading "Olympic Sports" rather than under its own heading. That drives me crazy. Basketball is an Olympic sport. So are baseball, boxing, tennis, and soccer. They would never lump those sports in a miscellaneous category with fencing, archery, water polo, and other sports that almost nobody pays any attention to (even during the Olympics).
The evil of putting us under the "Olympic Sports" category is, of course, the implication that our sport has significance only once every four years, which of course is not true. But it becomes true in the eyes of the readers who are told that this is how their daily newspaper thinks of track and field.
We should all write to the editors of our local papers when we see this. It's bad journalism and it's harmful to our sport.
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