Swimsuit Editions

I was thinking today about the strange persistence of sports magazines pushing their Swimsuit Editions, or more recently, The Body Issue from ESPN.

It’s one thing for SI to promote one issue a year that is clearly intended to sell subscriptions, and that only sometimes features athletes in various forms of undress.

But what is a really interesting ethical situation, in my opinion, is ESPN’s answer. With their release of “The Body” issue, ESPN is taking the people they cover and asking them to take their clothes off.

Some may see no problem with this. However, if you take the parallel, that is, a newspaper like the New York Times (presumably) paying politicians to pose in a special edition of the paper dedicated to ‘the human body.’

One of the main tenets of journalism is supposed to be maintaining independence from sources. Why is it that these sports magazines prefer to fly in the face of that important guideline?

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. But it is frustrating to see sports journalists take themselves less seriously than news journalists do.