National Sports Journalism Center

That headline sounds like the start of a joke, but it was the starting point for a pretty interesting sports-media dustup last week, one I’m still thinking about.

Here’s a brief recap: Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was chatting with some fans in a bar and one of those fans surreptitiously recorded about a minute of the exchange. The fan captured Jones saying that former coach Bill Parcells “isn’t worth a s—” and was hired because Jones needed him to get his stadium built, and saying he wouldn’t draft Tim Tebow because he’d never get on the field. Deadspin posted the video, after which numerous mainstream media outlets followed suit, dissecting Jones’ comments and arguing about whether they were newsworthy.

We’ll get to the origins of the video in a bit. Once it existed, though, was it fair of Deadspin to post it? I think so. Yes, part of the video’s appeal is simple voyeurism – I was amused to hit PLAY and hear the apparently lubricated owner of the Cowboys talk trash about coaches, stadium deals and college-football prodigies. But while Jones didn’t say anything earth-shaking, the opinions he expressed struck me as newsworthy, particularly since they came stripped of the dull diplomatic-speak of press conferences. Much of what we get from sports figures is so varnished and soporific that we gravitate instantly to anything that sounds like a real human being offering a real opinion. The video supplied that, and that made it compelling. (Disclosure: I’ve written occasionally for Deadspin, and am friends with its founder, Will Leitch.)

How about the mainstream media? Should they have ignored it?

On Dallas’s WFAA, sports anchor Dale Hansen argued in no uncertain terms that they should have. He said he’d discussed the story with his bosses and refused to cover it, offering a scathing commentary instead. In that commentary, Hansen called his station’s airing the video “yet another example of the decline of journalism as we once knew it. Our business now, too many times, is a fat kid in a T-shirt in his mother’s basement, eating Cheetos and writing his blogs — and we make it news.” If this is the world of news we now live in, Hansen added, “I don’t want to be a part of that world.”

Hansen hurt his case by trotting out the creaky “mother’s basement” trope – if you hear that one, you’re pretty safe in assuming that person doesn’t know anything about the Web. But his public dissent from his own station’s decision was compelling nonetheless. (And good for ratings, if you want to be cynical: WFAA got attention for covering the story and more attention for decrying its own coverage. Neat trick, that.)

While Hansen had passion on his side, I thought a lot of the criticism of Deadspin, blogs and the Web in general rang false: The strongest cries that journalism ethics have been violated invariably come when the media are stampeding through whatever door that supposed violation opened. It’s never a particularly edifying spectacle. (Besides, the fan who taped Jones didn’t need Deadspin or any other website – You Tube would have sufficed.) But amid all that, a few columnists explored an issue I found a lot more interesting.

One Deadspin commenter had this sarcastic reaction to Hansen’s commentary: “If Jerry Jones said ‘Tim Tebow could never get on the field’ and that he hired Parcells only to get the stadium in a press conference or during an interview, it would be news. But because he said the same thing in a bar, it’s not news. Got it.”

I agree with the point about newsworthiness, but think the question of the setting was dismissed too cavalierly.

Writing for TCPalm.com, Ray McNulty recalled that he came of age as a journalist understanding that “unless told otherwise, bar conversations were all off the record. People could talk to us in social settings and trust that what they said wouldn’t end up in the newspaper – unless, of course, they gave us the OK to do so.”

The Dallas Morning News’ Tim Cowlishaw observed that “a lot of us learned how to use bars as information-gathering centers many years ago. It was a springboard, a place to begin to get a feel for a story, not somewhere to conduct surreptitious recordings.”

Cowlishaw noted that the events that led to Jones’ parting ways with Jimmy Johnson began with a bar conversation. But, he said, two Dallas Morning News reporters treated that conversation as off the record and went back to Jones the next day looking for something on the record. “Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but there were rules that both sides mostly understood,” Cowlishaw wrote.

At ESPN Dallas, meanwhile, Jim Reeves recalled the unwritten code that was in effect when he covered the Texas Rangers in the 1970s and the early 1980s: “Bar conversations, unless specified otherwise, were all off the record. What happened in those saloons wasn’t reported either, unless police reports were filed or there was an incident that could impact the performance of the team on the field or in the clubhouse. For instance, when almost-done Goose Gossage went off on then-manager Bobby Valentine in an Oakland hotel bar near the end of the 1991 season, the incident hit the papers because it impacted the team. But there were no cell phones. Nobody was taking videos or pictures.”

Reeves’ unwritten rules strike me as good ones: We’re just talking, so you can be yourself – but if something’s going to impact the team, don’t expect us to look the other way. That preserves the opportunity to build relationships and rapport, but stops short of creating a clubby atmosphere in which journalists protect athletes at the expense of readers.

The problem is that fans with smartphones neither know nor care about these unwritten rules. It’s obvious Jones didn’t see he was being taped — these days it’s incredibly easy to record someone’s words or shoot video without them noticing. I know that Jones is a public figure, but public figures deserve some basic courtesy. Surreptitiously taping a conversation that reveals nothing of huge civic worth and making it public strikes me as stunningly rude.

And that’s the real shame of the Jones video: that it could make athletes and other sports figures even more withdrawn and deliberately bland.

“Our celebrities are dull now, because of this,” Paul Daugherty writes in the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Conversation, both serious and trashy, is stifled, because of this. Coaches don’t pose for pictures with females now, because of this. Players spend their free evenings sitting in VIP, because of this. They live in a bubble, because they can, but also because they have to.”

In discussing the video with a gaggle of reporters, Jones acknowledged that he might now be more guarded in public, noting correctly that these days any exchange is potentially an interview.

“It certainly makes me want to be very aware and careful about my comments,” he said. “You don’t get the benefit of editing, and you don’t get the benefit of a possible interpretation of something. … The phrasing, the words – we all know there’s a lot more to communication than that.”

Jones, to his credit, made no attempt to disavow the barroom video, or to back down from the substance of his comments. What made him unhappy was the lack of context. Those who didn’t know him could easily miss that his evaluation of Parcells was rough-and-tumble affection (Jones added that “I love him”), and his comments read very differently in print than when you hear them. As he put it himself, “you don’t get a sense of the framing of it and you don’t get to really hear the mindset or the mood. … It’s obvious I was having fun with these guys and looking to spar with them a little bit.”

We are still working out what it means when anything we do can be recorded and shared online. But maybe the answer isn’t to withdraw, but to stop apologizing for being human.

What I find a little hopeful is that the video seems to have done Jones no harm. And why should it? After watching it, I didn’t think worse of him – I’ll save that for the anonymous pianist who was doing terrible things to “Hotel California.” Heck, I liked him better. (The same goes for the Reds’ Jay Bruce, caught flipping his teammates a good-natured double bird in response to their razzing and forced to issue an outsized apology that made you think he’d vomited on a nun.)

“We, the mainstream media, committed the real crime,” Jason Whitlock wrote in his FoxSports column.  “We took the video seriously. … And you wonder why athletes don’t want to give us access and view us as a threat? We don’t have a sense of humor. We don’t allow athletes/celebrities to be human.”

Well, we should. More stories are going to be broken in bars by non-journalists and spread online. Some of those stories will be newsworthy, and deserve attention. (Witness Ben Roethlisberger’s current troubles.) Others clearly won’t be. And some will be in the middle. Sportswriters are no longer going to be able to decide what’s news and what isn’t, but we can help readers put that news into its proper context. And sometimes that starts with not punishing people for being blunt, harmlessly intemperate or for daring to be interesting – in other words, for being human. Sports are a lot more fun when they are.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.