As March Madness approaches journalists, and the occasional social activist, will argue that college student-athletes should be paid. All college student-athletes should be compensated via the freedom to sign marketing and endorsement deals. It is irrelevant whether companies should withhold payments until student-athletes graduate or whether student-athletes should have agents – until we figure out how to abolish or circumvent NCAA bylaws banning benefits. What is pertinent is the media should take the lead in the movement for endorsement deals for student-athletes. The media keeps athletes, especially high-profile student-athletes, under a “spell” with their countless online, radio, print, and television sports content. If a student-athlete’s sport has a professional league – the media helps to convince these young souls that they will go pro. Moreover, the media is simply a co-conspirator when it comes to the exploitation of student-athletes because their student-athlete driven content helps to create some wealthy online, print, radio and television journalists. Sadly, contemporary sports journalists share few characteristics with the writers who helped provoke Title IX and Proposition 48. Instead contemporary sports journalists are using student-athletes now more than ever. Over the weekend, Erin Andrews chronicled a Kansas basketball player who recently lost his grandparents and mother. The profile provided Andrews with much needed content, but what did the student-athlete and his seven-year old sister receive from the exploitation of their family tragedy? Nothing. On the other hand, what might happen if sports journalists started a prolonged campaign for the freedom for all student-athletes to sign endorsement deals? Something.
