About Almountakhab Moroccan newspaper-Written by: Badr Al-Din Al-Idrisi
We are lying to ourselves, if we say that our national sports media is ready from now to meet the professional challenges that our country’s organization of major sporting events presents, or even to anticipate the new phase that requires building a new horizon for national sports, but nothing says at all, that this sports media has reached a level of baseness and degradation, and is no longer able to produce figures, seeds and sports media discourse that meets all the rules of creativity and empowerment, until we witness at its door this strange crowd, of beings who claim that they are able to achieve the “greatest conquest”, to confiscate baseness and confront the sharp decline in the professional performance of sports media professionals.
We agree that sports media, the most exposed journalistic genre to penetration and dilution, after the dominance of communication media and the shaking of major media fortresses, has been exposed to many cases of fraud and misery that have produced slips that are forbidden by professional and ethical charters and that cannot be brought about by righteous professionals, and sometimes this media has dressed as the guilty against its will, but we do not agree at all that this sports media has become hopeless, in its form, in the type of its dealings, in its criticism and in keeping up with sports events, until it becomes a vehicle for those who have appointed themselves “reformers”, and have taken by force and coercion what they should not have taken, to declare themselves builders of the new sports media, and this media has its figures, men and symbols who possess the legitimacy and reference to reform each other, and to reform what has been spoiled by the infiltrators and those who do not like at all for sports media professionals to have one voice and one doctrine. Unfortunately, there are those who have underestimated the reform of sports media, the reform that means improving professional performance to win major challenges and fortifying its professionalism to prevent further breaches. They have seen it, due to its emptiness, as a mere folkloric organization of travel and establishing new signals that journalists follow to enter stadiums. In doing so, they are denouncing change and diminishing the value of Moroccan sports media, which until recently was transcontinental due to the efficiency of its figures and leaders. It even succeeded in nullifying the inferiority with which sports media was viewed in the minds of media entrepreneurs. The Moroccan sports media, which is celebrated internationally, in Africa and the Arab world for its merit and depth, has never been in a state of intellectual and professional deficiency to reorganize itself. This sports media, with its hundreds of figures and thinkers before the journalists it produced in past times, was never unable to overcome, without anyone’s help, the stage of terrible overlap between the professional and the non-professional, between the specialized and the sprawling, between the one who burns with the fire of the profession and the one who makes a living from homelessness. Therefore, there is no need for this folkloric season whose tents have been erected around the house of sports media, and whose noise and transgressions have spread, because it will not be able to address the professional depth of this complex media specialization. It chose the wrong path from the beginning, and it did so only because it wants to give something that it lacks. Bridging the gap that separates our Moroccan sports media from the media of our two neighbors, Spain and Portugal, our partners in organizing the 2030 World Cup, cannot be done through such stray, deviant and fragile approaches that are currently abuzz with the media scene, by those whose accuracy and specificity dictate the chronic pain experienced by national press companies, to focus on those priorities and allocate the vast majority of their time to them, and leave sports media to its people who know its branches better than others. This is not a diminution or a devaluation, but rather a belief from an experienced man, that reform, as these people see it, came out of the tent leaning, and therefore it is afflicted with a permanent disability, no matter how much these people exaggerate. Getting closer to the strong and cohesive structure of sports media in the two Iberian neighbors, and I am not claiming here that it is the closest model to us, requires that we go deep into the media training system in which sports specialization is not present, except in a kind of superficiality, and into our media enterprises, to establish a serious and good sports media, possessing the thought and tools to be of a quality that earns it trust and respect, and this is a path that can only be taken by sports media professionals who can, through depth and thought, create new forms of expression, while those who believe that change can only come about through intimidation, defamation and humiliation have no place in the aforementioned history.
