Narcissism at the Erie Times-News
by JOE LaROCCA
There was a newspaper column recently which raved about a special weekly sports section in the Erie Times-News called Varsity which focuses on teenagers in area schools involved in various aspects of scholastic sports.
The writer compared the voluminous space devoted in special sections of the newspaper to scholastic and professional sports today with that of bygone years. Sports editors of the past, he wrote, “would have killed for space like this.”
Then came the inevitable commercial. “The Erie Times-News has made a huge commitment to covering high school and professional sports in these sections.” Suspicious, I glanced down to the credit line at the end of the column, and sure enough, there it was, credited to my friend Kevin Cuneo, awash in narcissism, once again confusing his conflicting roles as “public editor” of the Times-News on the one hand, and public relations/promotions director on the other.
Without disparaging the inestimable coverage given by the Times-News to the energy and enthusiasm which sports-minded teenagers in the area lavish on athletics, one wonders when Cuneo will cease perverting the legitimate role that an authentic public editor should bring to newspaper readers, and acknowledge that he has turned the concept on its head, advocating for the newspaper rather than for its readers.
One doesn’t mind his advocating for the newspaper, just that he ought not to do it masquerading as a public editor, which is a hallowed role in journalism, not one which practices the self-serving antics of a huckster.
Cuneo wrote: “It's stunning when you go through the old sports sections of the 1950s and '60s and see how small those sections were compared to today's. A big difference, of course, is that women's sports have blossomed in recent years.”
That’s an interesting spin, which presumes somewhat self-consciously to attribute the difference to the newspaper’s altruistic impulses, but hardly accurate. The main reason why the Times-News devotes so much more space to sports today than it did in the distant past is a matter of survival. That’s the only way it can attempt to compete with the color, drama, spontaneity, immediacy and on-the-spot action that television brings to the sports world.
There was no television back in the 1950s and ’60 as we now know it, and the newspapers had a monopoly on sports coverage then. They could arrogate unto themseves how and when they covered what, and not just sports, but the broad spectrum of current events and public affairs. Nevermore.