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**IronMan** · 07-29-2009, 09:18 PM

Yael Grauer, one of the writers over at MMAOpinion, put this together. It's a pretty fantastic roundtable on the ethics of MMA journalism.

The pieces are going up over the course of ten days, so I'll update it so that all of the segments are linked to in this thread.

Below, I've copied an excerpt from the intro, written by Jim Murphy, one of the roundtable people:

Quote:

In my opinion, MMA journalists are in a unique position in sports media. On one hand, we’re here to cover the sport, good and bad. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to serve in sort of an ‘ambassadorial’ capacity toward mainstream media and the general public. If I didn’t love prizefighting and specifically MMA there’s a lot of things I could be doing that would make me a lot more money. Part of what we try to do at THE SAVAGE SCIENCE is to convey our love of the sport through our writing and coverage—let’s face it, we’re not embedded Pentagon correspondents. Maybe this has the effect of viewing the sport through the proverbial ‘rose colored glasses’. For the most part, I don’t have much of a problem with that. While there are certainly serious topics that we have a responsibility to address our hope is that a MMA noob could come to our site and at least start to get a feel for what is so great and unique about MMA and why we love it so much.

As a component of that, we place a high priority on covering the sport holistically—in other words, we’re not going to hawk the Zuffa party line just because they say we should. We’ve been accused of ‘Dana White bashing’ and of being UFC ‘haters’. That’s far from the case. When the UFC does something right—and they do a lot of great things for the sport—we give them credit. What we’re not going to do is give them a free pass. When Dana White went off on his tirade about Mirko Cro Cop after UFC 99, a lot of media outlets were screaming ‘OMG!! CRO COP PUNKED DANA’. We weren’t about to do that. In my book, that’s not being a ‘UFC hater’—that’s treating the entire sport and one of the most respected and accomplished fighters in it with respect.

So we try not to ‘pull punches’ when there’s a serious topic to cover, but at the same time we don’t read more into things than they warrant. On balance, we typically like to see gentlemanly behavior exhibited by fighters before, during and after bouts. Still, we’re not going to get all hysterical about Brock Lesnar and try to suggest he’s the downfall of MMA or Western Civilization. He’s great at promoting fights, and at the end of the day that’s the business everyone is in—even those of us in the media to a certain extent.

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