Media falters for St. Louis

Professional sports would likely be nowhere without the media. Sports rely on the media to present them to the public and market the games in the best manner possible. However, sometimes this reliance just fails entirely and ruins the livelihood of both parties. One fatal error led to one disaster in St. Louis.

Jason Heyward has been an above-average outfielder for his entire young career, but just has not quite put it together at the big league level to reach stardom. After spending the 2015 season in the St. Louis Cardinal organization, Heyward left in free agency for what appears to be greener pastures with the Chicago Cubs. One problem: the Cardinals and Cubs are bitter rivals, so you could imagine that Cardinal fans wouldn’t take too well to this news.

Well fast-forward to the Cubs’ first trip to St. Louis on April 19th, and Heyward was greeted with a plethora of ‘boos,’ but also plenty of applause as a way for the St. Louis faithful to voice their thanks for Heyward’s year of service.

The problem began on Twitter, as many seem to do nowadays, when Cubs writer Isaac Bennet tweeted “ESPN needs to be *very* careful with opening up their crowd mics. There are absolutely nasty things being said right now towards Heyward.” Alright so no big deal and no specific sayings mentioned, but perhaps a few insults.

This then snowballed from two more tweets, including one from self-described activist Bradley Ard, which said “Hey, #Cards fans! While you were too busy yelling the N-word and booing Heyward, the #Cubs were busy winning!”

Yikes! This is where we draw the line. Cardinal fans have long been called the best fans in baseball, and has in my mind, the best city for the game in all of America. With statements like this coming from the crowd, we may seriously have to reconsider our views.

Sports journalists throughout the country took this story and ran with it, claiming Cardinal fans are racist and don’t belong in baseball. So they must have had some pretty darn good sources, right? Nope, nobody did their journalistic duty to fact check and this story circulated in media all around the country.

The media took their evidence from a writer for a Cubs editorial and a rights activist seeking any mistake they can to reinforce their movement. Both were clearly biased, and here’s the kicker: neither were actually at the game. When ESPN and the two respective organizations went to review the tapes of the game, they failed to find any evidence suggesting slurs were used. Additionally, when asked, none of the players could recall anything from the claims made on Twitter. So ESPN didn’t get anything. Players didn’t hear anything. There were no eyewitness testimonies. Nor was there any video footage from a mobile phone.

A few days following the incident, the national media began to recognize they actually had nothing. The problem is that the original story is such a sexy headline that it drew so many readers. The one reported the lack of evidence did not have the same draw, meaning far fewer people saw it. So now we are left with a barrage of people who don’t know the actual truth, and still think the St. Louis fanbase is brutally racist, all in part to pitifully poor sports reporting.