Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?

I just realized isn't id odd that worldwide there is a sport section as a part of daily news?

Relic of ancient times "bread and games" (panem et circenses), time when people were politically manipulated with biggest distraction. I am thinking there is no cooking news, or musical news... Sport news are about what other people do, not what we personally do. There is no science block, gaming block, music block ... but along weather there is sport section?!

I do not in this moment, I do not know, it just feel strange and off, is there anyone else who shares similar feeling?

Update: Sorry, for not being clear, I specifically meant TV news, you know prime time. News, from country to country the one it is on around 8pm each day...

People have a need to be part of a tribe, and sports is a healthy way to do that opposed to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5zcXccNMY

Different people get different things out of it. Some people were involved in sports as youths or still play pickup basketball or soccer and that adds to the appreciation of the pro sport. Gambling on sports was huge even before they started to legalize it.

There should be a "video games" section of the NY Times ;)

Even if you are not an avid sportsball fan, don't sleep on the sportsbook growth as legalization and even deregulation abound with the introduction of crypto. This is a triple digit growth year over year market through the foreseeable decade. And state tax revenue is usually allocated directly to education.

And there's plenty of interesting prediction science and forecasting math involved ;)

Sports betting's growth in U.S. 'extraordinary'

https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/29174799/sports-bettin...

"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 own section, but I don't read it. (The Science block of the papers in my country are sometimes not very good. There is a lot of credulous copy&paste form PR, and technical words are replaced by inaccurate simplifications, so sometimes you have to decipher what was the original discovery. Also some Science hews are posted in the Health section if they are related to Medicine.)

An interesting part of sports is that they generate a continuous stream of random results. You can fill pages and pages writing the results and some ad hoc interpretation. If a team wins, it's because they changed the coach, if a team loose it' because one of the players is unhappy about the food in the training, whatever, it's very difficult to verify the hypothesis and people loves reading it and all the drama. https://xkcd.com/904/

News is entertainment and always has been. Since many people find sport entertaining, it makes sense to include sport in the daily news.