Nader asks papers to help inspire couch spuds
12/13/02 Stephen Koff Plain Dealer Bureau Chief
Washington - More Browns? More Yankees?
Fugeddaboudit. When it comes to his newspaper, Ralph Nader wants more stories about intramural volleyball, pickup basketball and touch football. Try Our Classifieds
The consumer advocate, former presidential candidate and Lou Gehrig idolater is asking America's newspapers for more coverage of recreational and participatory sports. A page a day would be ideal.
"I'd have them cover local leagues, local issues dealing with playgrounds, whether it's softball leagues, tennis, all the things that go on," Nader said. "Here in Washington, they play these pickup games over by the Washington Monument."
The real goal of the man responsible for the death of Chevrolet's Corvair - it was "Unsafe at Any Speed" - is to use newspapers to get couch potatoes off the couch and out of the chip bowl.
Obesity, diabetes and other illnesses "could be reduced by a better-informed, active, healthier and more confident citizenry," Nader wrote to managing editors at the nation's 50 largest newspapers.
Many newspapers have beefed up fitness coverage in recent years and provide regular stories about hunting, fishing and marathons. But to Nader, that's just a start.
"Most of the people who read the sports pages do a little sports themselves in their own community," he said. "They don't have adequate facilities, they're being kept off certain fields, they don't know there are leagues they can join. There's a whole world out there."
John Cherwa, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors, wonders whether those stories would draw enough interest to justify the use of limited newspaper space.
"That's why so many of our stories have to reach a broad audience," said Cherwa, sports coordinator for the Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, among other newspa pers. "If you're writing about a team like the Orlando Magic, you know it's going to reach a broad audi ence.
". . . But John Cherwa running a half-marathon? OK, so did 10,000 other people. You can't do 10,000 stories."
Plain Dealer Managing Editor Tom O'Hara agreed that Americans need to get off the couch. However, the paper has no plans to expand its coverage of participatory sports.
"The paper publishes a weekly calendar of such events that often consumes half a page," O'Hara said. "Outdoors reporter D'Arcy Egan regularly writes about such events, and we provide extensive coverage to the area's large marathons and triathlons."
Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism-education center in Florida, noted another possible hurdle: the sports department hierarchy. Entry-level sports reporters typically cover high school sports and aspire to cover the pros in five or 10 years. Coverage of Tuesday-night bowling would inevitably create a new rung in the ladder, and it wouldn't be high.
"It might be easier to achieve what Nader is arguing for by taking it out of the hands of the sports department," Clark said. Features sections could cover the health and fitness stories, while local news sections handled the rest.
However this plays out, Clark thinks "it's great" that the nation's best-known consumer advocate has turned his sights on the nation's newspapers. Newspapers boost their credibility when they listen to people outside the business, whatever their opinions, he says.
"Plus, it's refreshing to have somebody from the left telling us what to do."