"Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: An Essay About Major Media And Boyhood During The Black Sox Scandal
Submitted by freefortermpapers on 06/24/2008 03:00 PM
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"Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: An Essay About Major Media And Boyhood During The Black Sox Scandal
Wharton 1
Xavier Wharton
Period 2 English Composition
April 3, 2005
Extra! Extra! Read all About It: An Essay About Major Media and Boyhood During the Black Sox Scandal
Newspapers, the major means of the time, played huge roles in bringing about action against baseball corruption in the beginning of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919-1921. Newspapers brought the scandal into public consciousness and forced baseball to act. Of course anyone who understands the media understands that the information given was ninety-nine percent bias, and about one percent fact. This is why there is always conflict between the desire to know and the availability of materials from which to obtain that knowledge. Spiteful in its denunciation of the implicated players and gamblers, the media simultaneously anticipated and promoted the dominant way in which the Black Sox scandal would be remembered for generations; this in turn also had a profound affect on boyhood in America.
Single games had been thrown before and in 1877 the first betting scandal hit the national game. That year the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that the National League's Louisville Grays had been involved in a fix in October of 1877. Later that year four Louisville players were banned from baseball (Solomon, p. 23.). Corruption continued into the 20th Century, but owners ignored it because they felt it would ruin baseball as an industry (Ginsburg, p. 100).
A week after the Black Sox scandal became a national front-page sensation, the Sporting News, then commonly referred to as "Baseball's Bible," ran photographs of the eight men who were charged with selling out the game. The headline pleaded: "FIX THESE FACES IN YOUR MEMORY"(Nathan, p. 58). The caption reads:
These are the White Sox players who committed the astounding and contemptible crime of selling out the baseball world in the 1919 World's Series, not only of defrauding the public, but...
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