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Original Author TuborgLight.
Having just listened to Robbie Savage's reaction to a local journalist who had reported 'rumours that the players think the club's backroom staff aren't up to the job' it raised a couple of issues to do with responsible journalism.
Having just listened to Robbie Savage's reaction to a local journalist who had reported 'rumours that the players think the club's backroom staff aren't up to the job' it raised a couple of issues to do with responsible journalism.
Savage was unhappy with the journalist who reported these rumours and his fury at the lack of support from local journalists to Derby County FC was clear. First off Savage asks the local journalist to tell him who his source for the rumours was, which rightly the journalist refuses to tell him. Savage doesn't think that it was responsible journalism to repeat these rumours on the radio, but if the journalist has a reliable and trustworthy source then the rumours could actually be closer to fact than Savage knows, and therefore the journalist probably feels the Derby fans deserve to know.
Savage also expects the local journalists to get behind the team and support the team, which by all rights they should do when the team are playing well and producing good results but when they are struggling, which Derby clearly are following their 4-1 defeat to Scunthorpe United, responsible journalism would be to report the fact that they are struggling and not gloss over it and make out that Derby are the best team in the world. Savage says that a journalist reported "Boos echo around Pride Park" and says "people can hear that for themselves" which of course they can, well the ones at Pride Park can! A home crowd booing their team at the end of the match is pretty important to a sport story, it shows the reader and the fans who didn't attend that the majority of home fans aren't happy with the way the team performed. I for one, would be quite annoyed if my local paper didn't report the unhappiness of the home fans just as they would report the delight of the same fans if their team had won the cup!
It is not the role of a local journalist to continually talk up the team and praise them and it is not the role of the footballer or the teams to dictate what the reporters can report. The journalist reports what is important to their audience and in this case, Derby's struggle is important local sports news to BBC Radio Derby!
You can hear the interview here:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/d/derby_county/8453055.stm
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