Another commenter mentioned the stock market report. Again, easy reliable filler material. Despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a tenuous effect at best for the vast majority of people, and despite the fact that it's not a great overall economic indicator, the news media report it because it's easy, and it changes daily.

Truly "newsworthy" stories are not guaranteed to happen every day. But the news media still need to fill space regardless. That's why they love things that reliably change on a daily basis. "Team A beat Team B" is such an easy story to write. It practically writes itself. Compare with true investigative reporting, which is extremely difficult, may take months or years, and may or may not have publishable results. How much investigative reporting can you do and still have a daily news report?

Why does the news media always cover elections as if they were horse races (and inevitably lament that in retrospect with crocodile tears for exactly 1 week after the election before forgetting and doing it again the same way the next election)? Because it's easy. You could say lazy. Candidate A is up in the polls this week, Candidate B is down. Such an easy story to write. You can keep taking polls, and keep publishing polls, and you've filled a bunch of news space cheaply.

Don't even get me started on how the "news" is now largely publishing tweets written by other people. The ultimate in journalistic laziness.

I feel the consumers deserve a large part of the responsibility. Too few people want to pay for quality news, or even simply give their attention to quality news.

There are lots of things in the news that some people don't care about - they report on traffic (or at least they used to) even though many people don't commute. They report on the stock market even though many people aren't invested. These days they sometimes report on Bitcoin and other crypto, even though the vast majority of the world has no interest. Speaking of the world, they report on world news that most people don't care about, because they're only interested in their own country.

The news reports on things that people care about. A lot of people care greatly about sports. Just because you're not one of them doesn't mean it's strange to report on them.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. – Thoreau, Life Without Principle

All but the most historic games are forgotten almost instantly, and even the most historic games have a very limited cultural life.

How many people care what happened in baseball in 1971 - never mind 1921?

Meanwhile those people are still reliant on applications of quantum theory, which was first described in 1900, even if they're not aware why it matters to them.

The bigger problem with sports is they encourage superficial tribalism and even racism.

This was very obvious in the UK during and after the Brexit debate. Vocal Brexiters seemed to think "winning" and "losing" were a team event, and most - especially those with football team flags on their Facebook profiles - literally didn't seem able to understand that there would be hard consequences for the country as a whole which went far beyond the immediate result.

But it just highlights that team sports are light entertainment dressed up as something more admirable.

If the media wanted to skew the balance they could concentrate more on individual amateurs.

Someone who goes from barely being able to run to a marathon is going to have an interesting and inspiring story. I'd be more interested in hearing about that kind of victory than the weekly/annual filler round of Famous Team A vs Famous Teams B-Z.

Wrong scale. Think smaller by several orders of magnitude. Think the daily life of someone with a dead end job, a wife they hate, and two awful kids. If their local team wins, that's a great victory by proxy. A victory to crow about with mates, a victory to tolerate a kid's failing grades, a victory to stoke the old love machine. We're tribal pack hunting monkeys. If our tribe wins, we win. And winning, of any kind, feels great.

Local TV news in the US is fixated on weather, fires, car accidents, gruesome crime stories and so-called "human interest" stories, rarely covers local government. Now that's something I don't understand. Are we that shallow? The iconic local news image is that of a young cub reporter doing a video "standup" late at night in front of, say, a suburban home where a murder took place several hours previously. Why is it so important for everyone within 50 miles to hear about it?

You can rightly say that those stories don't interest you. They don't interest me, and as such I don't watch a lot of local news. But there are huge swaths of people that do watch this content. That is why it exists.

It is like ads on the internet. They exist because they work on someone, even if they don't work on _you_.

People like sports, and there are new sports events all the time. They want to know what happened. Using “the news” to relay this information seems like a reasonable, entertaining and profitable way to do this.

Heading to NYT, I see: weather, biden, covid, trump, capital riot, zoom teaching, auto industry batteries, The Rock, prosecco, fashion advice, etc.

heading to NPR: weather, history, dinosaurs, mardi gras parades, pelosi, movies, parler app, obituary, romance, history

Yeah, I don't know if sports is really that "unique". The news is basically anything one of these websites puts up to capture attention and clicks and show ads. Sports is at a lull right now in USA, but it captures attention well, so people like to report on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5zcXccNMY

Different people get different things out of it. Some people were involved in sports as youths or still play pickup basketball or soccer and that adds to the appreciation of the pro sport. Gambling on sports was huge even before they started to legalize it.

And, naturally, just because something's enormously popular doesn't mean it's worth caring about.

No other hobby / form of entertainment / pass time gets this much airtime on such a regular basis.

It's even stranger now during Covid times. Where's the hourly eSports update?

Also for the record, I love playing sports. I’ve just never really understood sports spectators, nor those fans that rabidly follow sports stats. The caveat being I can understand parents watching their kids play, just not this whole watching strangers called “professional athletes” play sports.

Sports spectating is about stories. What ends up woven together out of individual matches is patterns, and humans love sussing out patterns and identifying them... There's a whole psychological reward system that is triggered by forming a prediction and watching it come true. So a lot of sports wonks watch for that hit... When their favorite player does his signature play, or their favorite team uses the strategy they've honed to a fine point to win a game.

In a sense, I personally watch SpaceX launches for the same thing. Does my day-to-day hinge on whether an additional 60 Starlinks get to orbit? Definitely not; I'm not in the aerospace field, and I'm fortunate enough to have a high-speed fiber landline plumbed into the side of my home by a previous owner. But I get to see whether the rocket will land this time (or, for that matter, whether it'll go up or something will violate expectations and the whole mission will go off the rails). I derive catharsis from the expectation / tension / satisfaction loop of a successful launch, landing, and deploy. It's a story of successful engineering.

Consider that by knowing someone's preferred source of news you can typically predict their political views with 90%+ accuracy, particularly if we're talking prime time broadcasting.

The news is meant to entertain: "To hold the attention of (someone) with something amusing or diverting.". To grip you, you're told stories about "your team" and its triumphs and tragedies. Sport is a relatively simple and benign aspect to all this.

In general (and some sports coverage does this), the rest of the recipe calls for outrage against "their team". It calls out their shenanigans and instills a sense of superiority over them. And as there is literally nothing you can do about any of this the only goal is to keep you coming back for more.

Perhaps in the past (... get off my lawn!) there were more attempts to inform people in a neutral sense. Maybe even to help people challenge their thinking and their bias so they're better equipped to negotiate disagreements in matters they can engage in and affect.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/

> Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dressed up as a sausage won a TV talent contest or that a character died on Eastenders is not national news, IMHO.

I have a couple of thoughts. First, can someone clarify what "something" is? Comments seem balanced between "you must not like sportball" and offering other information-ish things as evidence of, well, something. If the point is to qualify sportball as news, I'm unclear how those accomplish that.

Second, I expect comments to proceed to "Well, what is news anyway?" and here's what I have for that.

The extra-constitutional protections given to the press by the 1A imply a duty by news orgs to act as an adversary to Govs and other powerful interests - to unearth their misdeeds and other effects of public interest.

Reporting that honors press' 1A protections seems to unambiguously qualify as news. Reporting outside the scope of that may better qualify as information and/or entertainment.

No one is saying that information and entertainment shouldn't be published. However, universally cheap publishing provides endless sport/celeb/infotainment options to us. It is unclear how news orgs best serve us by redirecting resources away from 1A implied duties - just to provide the bazillionth option to hear about sport/celebs.

What is stranger by far, and more alarming, is the creep of soft news -- celebrity news and other "lifestyle" news -- from the end of the newspaper to the front page. Here is an example: "Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum’" [1]. In 2017, that article was front–page news in the New York Times [2].

It shouldn't have been. Tweets and celebrity news should almost never be prominently featured by a news organization. And this article was both: it was about a tweet by a celebrity, LeBron James. It was a story that might be suitable on the cover of People or a tabloid, but not for a serious news organization.

Which makes you wonder what has been happening to the Times.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/sports/football/trump-nfl...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/images/2017/09/24/nytfrontpage/scan....

Not only the games, but what the players, their wives, kids, families, fan clubs, and whatever else are up to.

Think of all of the times that Trump tweeted something about a celebrity, or that celebrities tweeted about Trump. I don’t think it can be right to say that these were all newsworthy events.

But suppose that we restrict consideration to only those cases in which Trump tweets something about a celebrity (rather than a celebrity tweeting something about Trump). I think that even this more limited set of cases is rarely news – and almost never news worthy of the front page.

It shouldn't be front-page news if it happens so frequently and through such shallow exchanges. Really newsworthy events are happening every day, but instead of covering them, the Times chose to put a Twitter squabble on its front page. I don't think that we can justify its decision just by noting that the content was political and that the parties to the dispute were prominent.

Solution: Offer things people are interested in watching, like sports.

Basically enough people like watching sports news that it is worthwhile for news programs to offer coverage, so that they get more viewers and can command higher prices for commercial ads. It's as simple as that.

In the modern world with 24 hour dedicated channels for effectively everything this is just tradition now.

People are interested in various things. News is whatever people find interesting that shows up when you diff today vs yesterday.

Anyway, from the top of NYT page:

> World / U.S. / Politics / N.Y. / Business / Opinion / Tech / Science / Health / Sports / Arts / Books / Style / Food / Travel / Magazine / T Magazine / Real Estate / Video

Cooking news is inside Food. Music news are inside Arts.

Science has it's own section, but I don't read it. (The Science block of the papers in my country are sometimes not very good. There is a lot of credulous copy&paste form PR, and technical words are replaced by inaccurate simplifications, so sometimes you have to decipher what was the original discovery. Also some Science hews are posted in the Health section if they are related to Medicine.)

An interesting part of sports is that they generate a continuous stream of random results. You can fill pages and pages writing the results and some ad hoc interpretation. If a team wins, it's because they changed the coach, if a team loose it' because one of the players is unhappy about the food in the training, whatever, it's very difficult to verify the hypothesis and people loves reading it and all the drama. https://xkcd.com/904/

Bread and circus political distraction has never gone out of style.

Sports reporting makes perfect sense.

News is about finding things that concern/interest you. Hacker news, happens to be a place where I find lots of things of interest and some things of concern. I expect to see if my team won that day's match that night on the news.

Primetime news is no different. We want to know if our team won the game, so it is reported.

It's everything else on primetime news that doesn't make sense, or points to a serious issue.

It isn't that we _have_ sports on the news, the problem is what we _don't have_ on the news. That cheezy little bit about the old ladies down at the community center doing a bake sale for the school. We don't have the local farmer on talking about how the highway road closure is affecting him. Nothing about the local religious group doing homeless ministry, or the individual homeless on your specific streets.

What we have on the news: a bunch of things that our online lives have taught us are important, that drastically inform our online selves, how to speak, think, what is worrisome. And yet none of those things that our online lives tell us is so important, hardly affects our material lives, lived in our local geographic material area, at all.

We desire to be informed about the things that concern us. Our problem is we have made things that were never a concern to previous generations, our greatest concern, and the greatest concerns to previous generations, the least concern. At the very least previous generations and ours have enjoyed our local team's sports for whatever weird reason.

No one (should) give a crap if their neighbor is a Trump supporter or Biden supporter: Your neighbor needed a cup of some sugar to bake some cookies for the bake sale and you gave them some.

(And probably the most accurate)

Even if you are not an avid sportsball fan, don't sleep on the sportsbook growth as legalization and even deregulation abound with the introduction of crypto. This is a triple digit growth year over year market through the foreseeable decade. And state tax revenue is usually allocated directly to education.

And there's plenty of interesting prediction science and forecasting math involved ;)

Sports betting's growth in U.S. 'extraordinary'

https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/29174799/sports-bettin...