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Nuance is not the most marketable word in the English language, coming some distance behind even 'balance'. As a reader I want to know what a writer believes and as a journalist I want to be able to write a headline that compels. I have no doubt that a columnist who consistently fails to reach a conclusion is in the wrong job.
But I heard a troubling variation on that theme on Sky Sports News on Wednesday morning, in a discussion about the issues of the day - Capello versus the FA, Suarez versus Evra, the Crown versus Redknapp and Mandaric - that strayed on to the way Fleet Street's leading writers and editors handle such stories. The subject was whether the main men were allowed to express their opinion to those in charge and then allowed just to run with it.
Paul McCarthy was the guest and agreed this should happen, saying that he believed: "People write at their best when they're angry." He added that there was a saying in journalism about chief football writers and chief sports writers: "If you can see both sides of the argument you are in the wrong job." Cue laughter in the studio, as the former sports editor of the News of the World continued: "The man in the pub doesn't say: 'On the one hand this, on the other hand there's this.'"
It is a view of journalism that may strike an immediate chord but to this jaundiced mind, instead of a giggle it brought forth the question: "How many pints have been drunk by the man in the pub you're writing for?"
Football and the media have a lot in common, as sources of entertainment. We do all take the game too seriously at times. However frustrating it may be when a manager, a player, a pundit or a journalist says something that is flat-out untrue - usually about the laws of the game - it does not ultimately matter and the opportunity this gives us to vent is actually one of the benefits of following the sport. Football's original growth in popularity as a spectacle rather than a pastime owed much to the chance it gave factory workers to escape their occupation and their standing at the end of the week.
But on occasion football is more than a game, and the big issues of today raise questions beyond entertainment. Attitudes to race and to the law matter far beyond the individual cases. The mistake made by many in the game and by supporters who unthinkingly take their club's line is to miss the wider significance and surely journalists need to avoid the same trap.
Whatever McCarthy thinks, this is a time not for anger but for thoughtfulness. I wonder which we will see more of.
Philip Cornwall
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