SPECIAL REPORT: CRIME & SPORTS ’95 : Newspapers Don’t Always Report the Whole Story : Media: While charges are often front-page news, dropped charges or acquittals can get lost in shuffle.

Last June, the New York Times, Miami Herald and Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer reported that Tyler Lawrence, a free-agent linebacker signed by the New York Giants, had been arrested on a charge of sexual battery.

On Aug. 7, after the Broward County (Fla.) district attorney decided against charging Lawrence, the player’s agent, David Joseph, said he faxed a press release to the three newspapers.

But despite Joseph’s effort, the newspapers never reported that Lawrence had been cleared.

“It hurt Tyler a great deal because no matter where he went, people were asking him about it,” Joseph said. “He would try and tell them he was innocent, but he knew some people didn’t believe him.”

David Wilson, sports editor at the Herald, acknowledged the paper’s mistake in not printing the resolution. The original Lawrence item was printed in a different section of the paper.

“We and many other places talk a great deal about fairness,” he said. “When a charge is dropped it is not always given the exact same treatment because of many factors, including the nature of the news that day, but there is an acknowledgment that if we put a headline on a charge then we will put a headline on the story if the charges are dropped.”

Sports editors and journalism experts agree that newspaper sports sections are covering alleged criminal behavior by athletes more comprehensively than ever before. But as the coverage increases, some weaknesses have been exposed.

Lawrence’s case is an example of one of the sports media’s most common shortcomings: a failure to publish the resolution of incidents they originally report. Experts also said that sports sections still fail to give enough attention to some crimes, particularly violence against women.

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To be sure, sportswriting has changed dramatically in the last few decades.

“Twenty-five years ago, [Mickey] Mantle was going to bat admittedly half-drunk,” said Don Skwar, sports editor of the Boston Globe. “Writers knew it then. They could see it. Did they write about it? No. That’s the kind of history sportswriters have had.”

That legacy has not disappeared, particularly in college towns.

In the Oct. 28 edition of Editor and Publisher magazine, editors at the Omaha World-Herald were accused by reporters at the paper of delaying and then scaling down an investigative package on crime by athletes at the University of Nebraska.

The reporters said Nebraska football Coach Tom Osborne asked the editors to hold the piece because recruiting would be affected. Editors at the World-Herald denied the allegations.

“Nebraska controls the media. Notre Dame controls the media,” said Sandy Padwe, associate dean at the Columbia School of Journalism and a former senior editor at Sports Illustrated.

“Coaches know how to manipulate the press. Sports information directors know how to manipulate. Look at what Christmas presents they give the reporters and editors, how many tickets they can get them. That is why sportswriters wish some things would just disappear.”

Bill Dwyre, Times sports editor, said, “Padwe’s perceptions are generally accurate, although somewhat outdated. The Times, and most major sports sections that I’m aware of, have policies that prohibit writers and editors from taking Christmas gifts from sources and taking free tickets to sporting events.”

Most believe there has been a substantial improvement by newspapers covering a side of sports that once went unreported. The Associated Press gets partial credit for that. The wire service is within reach of every college or even minor league sports team and has chipped away at practices of the past. The wire service estimates more than 1 billion people worldwide see its information daily, either from one of the 1,555 daily newspapers that subscribe or radio and television reports.

“Thank God for the AP,” Padwe said. “They can’t keep out the AP.”

Said Frank Deford, former senior editor at Sports Illustrated and of the now-defunct National Sports Daily: “Sports journalists don’t see themselves as cheerleaders anymore. Before every journalist grew up and went to Oklahoma or whatever school, and then wrote about them. Now there isn’t that allegiance because the writer may have grown up across the country.”

Many contend that sportswriters and editors are also becoming better journalists. Increased dealings with law enforcement and the judicial system have broadened their reporting skills. And they are drawing on other resources at their papers.

“Court and city-side reporters are smart enough people and are more aware and are making the sports editors more aware,” Padwe said. “People are more responsible to the news on the city-side and less responsible to the athletes.”

Also, sports editors are quick to ask for assistance from specialized reporters.

Nonetheless, gaps remain in the coverage.

The primary, and most severe, problem centers on athletes such as Lawrence, who become news items when they are arrested but may be ignored when they are exonerated or found guilty.

“Teams I called always asked about Tyler’s charge, and I feel it certainly affected his chances of playing in the NFL after he was cut by the Giants,” Joseph said. “I think he was seen as untouchable by most teams.”

Another such case involves Kansas State linebacker Percell Gaskins, whose Oct. 25 assault charge ran in USA Today’s Sportsline on the front page of the paper’s sports section. On Nov. 6, those charges were dropped when a team trainer testified that Gaskins was in the team weight room at the time of the incident.

The story was reported by the Associated Press but never reported in USA Today.

“The flow of news on a given day may make something significant or insignificant,” said Gene Policinski, USA Today’s managing editor for sports. “We don’t want to get into three lines on Sportsline requiring three lines on another day. The flow of news dictates that, just like it does at any newspaper.”

Others disagree, saying complete coverage is the responsibility of the newspaper.

“We must remember from an ethical perspective that fairness demands that we need to revisit those cases,” said Bob Steele, director of ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. “Just because a case drops off the radar screen doesn’t mean we shouldn’t revisit it.”

A random selection of charges against athletes reported by The Times’ sport section showed that after twice printing brief items on inside pages about battery charges against University of Miami linebacker James Burgess (once in June when the incident occurred, again in September when the player was suspended by Miami for two games), The Times never reported that Burgess was acquitted on Sept. 16.

“In this day and age of high tech computers that allow us fairly quick searches of material that is run, there is no good excuse for us not to follow through all the way on alleged criminal items,” Dwyre said. “The very fact that we’re doing this project proves to me the shocking amount of crime going on in sports and the corresponding need for sports sections to follow it more thoroughly.”

To try to prevent this happening again, The Times will now keep a computer log of all reported criminal cases so that it can follow through on them.

Newspapers sometimes miss following up on events involving athletes within their circulation area.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer ran a story about a police investigation of Cleveland Indian Albie Lopez on the cover of its sports section on Jan. 21. No charges had been filed, but authorities in Lopez’s hometown of Mesa, Ariz., were looking into a fight in which he was allegedly involved Jan. 6.

The investigation was completed and no charges were filed, but news of that never made the Plain-Dealer.

Plain-Dealer Sports Editor Roy Hewitt said the resolution did not warrant a story because no charges were filed against Lopez.

“A lot of people get investigated without being charged,” he said. A lot of people don’t have their investigations on the cover of the sports section.

“I don’t think [lack of follow-up stories] is a matter of motivation, just a matter of sloppy journalism,” the Poynter Institute’s Steele said. “We are not as good as we should be at following up or handling a twist in a story. We tend to be more reactive than proactive and tend to be bound by breaking events.”

Newspapers are also restricted by the method the Associated Press uses to deliver the news.

The wire service reports some charges against an athlete out of its New York office, which dispatches information nationally. But resolutions to those cases sometimes are considered too small for national interest and are reported out of regional or state offices, which send information only to select areas.

“There are certainly flaws in the system,” said Randy Herschaft, acting head of librarians for the Associated Press, who added that the AP is working to improve access to such information.

The sports media has also only recently, and sometimes reluctantly, begun addressing issues that for years were ignored. Violence against women is a one example.

In a story reported in the March 30, 1991 edition of The Times, Sugar Ray Leonard’s wife testified in divorce proceedings that the former boxer not only used drugs but also abused her physically on many occasions.

“I remember a female editor came up to me at the National and showed me all that we had done on Sugar Ray and I realized that we had blown it,” Deford said. “We played up the drugs so much and treated the domestic violence like a side dish. And in the follow-up stories, the wife beating was just dropped out.”

The National was not alone.

Although The Times wrote in great length about the issue in early stories, the follow-ups focused primarily on the shame in Leonard’s drug use. Also, an editorial by the newspaper failed to mention that he had abused his wife.

“I think there is a tendency on some reporters’ parts to consider something domestic as private and not part of a beat,” said the Boston Globe’s Skwar.

“If someone [a reporter] hears something like that, they might think, ‘That’s not my business or part of my beat.’ So they might not pursue the story as much as something else like a trade.”

Sociologists agree coverage of violence against women has a long way to go.

“Does the media cover violence against women properly?” said Michael Messner, a professor of sociology at USC and author of several books about sociology and sports. “I think we’re in a transition period. Then [during the Sugar Ray Leonard story] it was that the sports media didn’t want to or didn’t know how to cover it. In O.J. [Simpson], potentially the only silver lining was the wake-up call to the media. I think partly that there has been a lag [by the sports media] in covering violence against women.”

“Maybe the things about sports reporters is that they are in a male world, part of the male monopoly. There has been an unconscious conspiracy grounded in shared assumptions of what is news and what is not.”

Cathy Henkel, sports editor at the Seattle Times, said she does not see a reluctance by reporters to cover violence against women or any other issue. But more diversity in the newsroom would help, she said, even if it perpetuates a tendency of editors to assign women to stories about violence against women or nonwhite reporters to cover race issues. For this project, The Times assigned a woman to report a story about violence against women and two African American reporters to report the story examining crime among black athletes.

“Getting people from different backgrounds, having different perspectives is always good,” Henkel said. “You bring a lot more voices and ways to look at things. Unfortunately, it takes time to build. It’s like a glacier in terms of speed to rectify that.”