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Opinion: Don’t Blame Beat Reporters For Pursuing Rally RatCoon Story

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Opinion: Don't Blame Beat Reporters For Pursuing Rally RatCoon Story

Was it a rat or a raccoon? We may never know.

But within a few hours of the Mets rushing off the field into the tunnel, Jeff McNeil taking the field with what might have been a black eye, and Francisco Lindor’s bizarre press conference in which he announced he and McNeil had merely seen an animal and been debating its species, vocal fans on Twitter had come up with a more important question: Who cares? Why was the media refusing to let the story go? The Mets had clearly put the story behind them; what business did the beat reporters have pursuing it any further?

“The anti-media sentiment was bizarre,” said Tim Healey, who covers the Mets for Newsday. “I was really surprised at that.”

Online, the debate was pretty much settled: this wasn’t a story. McNeil and Lindor had put it behind them. Mets fans didn’t care about it. It was over. The media was beating a dead horse.

That argument, though, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what a reporter’s job is. Quite simply, reporters are there to report the news, and this was undoubtedly news. Healey and Justin Toscano, who covers the Mets for The Record and NorthJersey, both told me almost the same thing. “The $341 million shortstop and the second baseman beside him having a big disagreement is a story,” Toscano said. “It just is.”

“It’s so obviously a story,” Healey said, “that it would be negligent of me not to write a story about it.”

To those who objected to media treatment of the events, the ideal media coverage of the fracas must have looked something like this. First, the dust-up happens, and the media asks questions about it. Second, Lindor tells the rat/raccoon story. Third, the media stops asking questions and accepts what they’ve been told.

It shouldn’t be difficult to see why this would be completely unjustifiable — or “negligent” — on the media’s part. The whole job of the reporter is to question everything and find the truth. Any reporter who just accepted the Mets’ version of the story and stopped asking questions because they didn’t want to make people look bad or anyone uncomfortable, wouldn’t be reporting; they’d be working for the Mets’ PR department.

Much of the anti-media sentiment, I suspect, isn’t based on deeply-held principles of media ethics: it’s based on Mets fandom. Mets fans want the Mets to play baseball and not be distracted or derailed by non-baseball controversy. But imagine if there was a fight in the Yankees’ clubhouse? Or on the set of a major movie? Or in the White House? In all those circumstances, Mets fans would count on the media to cover the story. They would deserve a media that treated things fairly and objectively and didn’t let stories go just because they made the people involved look bad.

Think about what happened from an unbiased perspective. The Mets rushed off the field into the tunnel as if they’d spotted a major commotion; Jeff McNeil looked like he had a black eye; Francisco Lindor told a story at a press conference that didn’t make much sense. Clearly, there’s a story here. To criticize the media for pursuing it is to criticize journalists for doing their essential jobs.

Some argue that Mets fans just don’t care about this story, so journalists aren’t serving them by pursuing it. But…how do they know? It’s all too common to replace “I myself don’t care” with “nobody cares,” but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

“I see how many people read my stories, and I promise you, people care,” Healey said.

And besides, “people don’t care” isn’t an excuse for not telling a story because people might care only after the story has been told. Nobody cared about Watergate until Woodward and Bernstein exposed it; likewise, if a reporter managed to reveal the full, inside story of what happened in the tunnel, maybe the gory details of the event would reveal something Mets fans cared about.

I can’t help but agree with Healey’s sentiment: the anti-media sentiment is bizarre. The Mets’ star shortstop — newly signed to a $341-million contract — may have gotten into a fight with his double play partner, then lied about it at a press conference. This doesn’t mean the Mets are dysfunctional, and it doesn’t make Lindor a villain, but it was undoubtedly a story that the media needed to pursue. That becomes clear when you remove your Mets fandom and examine the story objectively — exactly what beat reporters need to do.

“As a beat reporter, you are not a fan of the team,” Healey said. “It’s your job to report on news, and this was news.”

Opinion: Don't Blame Beat Reporters For Pursuing Rally RatCoon Story

The post Opinion: Don’t Blame Beat Reporters For Pursuing Rally RatCoon Story first appeared on Metsmerized Online.

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