Ever Josue Figueroa, Patrick Ferrucci
This study looks at opinion articles and sports columns in the aftermath of Terry Rozier’s illegal gambling arrest. Rozier was arrested for allegedly conspiring with organized crime rings and was accused of taking himself out of games to manipulate prop bets. The aftermath of the incident prompted a barrage of metajournalistic discourse, where writers attempted to paradigm repair sports media and the leagues relationships with sports betting corporations. Using textual analysis, this study analyzed 36 articles that wrote about sports gambling’s influence on the NBA and sports media. The findings suggest that journalists invoked paradigm repair tactics to defend the field of sports journalism from perceptions of illegitimacy but also attempted to repair the image of the NBA as an object of journalistic coverage. We dub this tactic peripheral mending , which demonstrates how mutualistic relationships further blur journalisms’ professional boundaries.