Forum: Erasing sports coverage narrows the lens on public life
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
I refer to assistant sports editor Rohit Brijnath’s Opinion piece “What we really lose when we lose the sports pages”
A newspaper is more than a business. It is a public trust, a civic institution charged with recording the rhythms of daily life.
When the Washington Post shutters its sports section, it does not merely cut costs – it abdicates responsibility.
Sports journalism has never been about box scores alone. As Mr Brijnath wrote, it is about “humans at play”.
It is the theatre of exhaustion, resilience, absurdity and joy: a tennis player vomiting from effort, a cricket team weeping after a razor-thin loss, an Olympian disqualified for honouring fallen athletes. These are not trivial diversions; they are stories of struggle and spirit that help communities make sense of themselves.
To erase such coverage is to narrow the lens on public life. It is to betray the trust readers place in their newspaper to chronicle the full spectrum of human experience. Audiences still crave these narratives, but in evolving formats.
A true public institution adapts; it does not retreat. To withdraw rather than innovate is to signal that the paper no longer sees itself as a custodian of collective memory.
The closure of the sports pages is thus more than a financial manoeuvre.
It is a symbolic wound, a breach of civic duty.
In losing the sports section, a mirror of society’s passions and vulnerabilities is lost. And in that loss, we risk forgetting that newspapers are meant to serve not just as chroniclers of politics and crises, but as keepers of shared joys, heartbreaks and games.
Al R. Dizon
