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"Bread and games" was an worked as a political tool 2000 years ago, it works today, and it will be still work 2000 years in the future. 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 ow…
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.
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
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.
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?
News is entertainment and always has been. Since many people find sport entertaining, it makes sense to include sport in the daily news.
Ok, it is fine in papers, internet, but I am talking about prime time TV...
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.