Len Bias?* No, no. I said MEDIA bias.

"Over the past two decades, academic research has generated literally hundreds of articles and books empirically challenging the alleged economic wonders of new stadiums, even when they're part of larger development schemes. I have been studying and writing about publicly financed stadiums for more than 10 years and cannot name a single stadium project that has delivered on its original grandiose economic promises, although they do bring benefits to team owners, sports leagues and sometimes players...

In a just-released article in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, my colleagues and I studied media coverage of 23 publicly financed stadium initiatives in 16 different cities, including Philadelphia. We found that the mainstream media in most of these cities is noticeably biased toward supporting publicly financed stadiums, which has a significant impact on the initiatives' success.

This bias usually takes the form of uncritically parroting stadium proponents' economic and social promises, quoting stadium supporters far more frequently than stadium opponents, overlooking the numerous objective academic studies on the topic, and failing to independently examine the multitude of failed stadium-centered promises throughout the country, especially those in oft-cited "success cities" such as Denver and Cleveland."

--Rick Eckstein, Philadelphia Enquirer

Found via The Sports Economist, along with this post on the public financing of an arena in Oklahoma City. Oh, and remember that article Matt linked to last week, the one about the Seattle Sonics flip-flopping on the economic benefits a sports team provides to a city because they want to get out of their current arena lease? Well, according to Dennis Coates, one of the professors who posts on The Sports Economist, the expert the Sonics used to make this argument was Brad Humphreys (see comments in this post). Humphreys is a contributor to The Sports Economist, as well as a former associate professor of economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also known for positing that professional sports facilities provide little economic impact to a city or region.

Interestingly, Humphreys has moved on, and north. He is now an associate professor of economics, and Chair in the Economics of Gaming, at the University of Alberta. Yet despite the proximity, and the apparent expertise (he was called to testify in front of the U.S. Congress in 2007), Professor Humphreys has, to my knowledge, only been referenced once in the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun as it pertains to the proposed downtown hockey arena. That was in a Susan Ruttan story in the Journal on October 11th, 2007. In that story, Ruttan mentions Humphreys' appearance before Congress; she also notes that he is a professor at the University of Illinois, even though he joined the Faculty of Arts for the fall of 2007--before her story appeared--teaching a 400-level "Economics of Sports" class.

Professor Dan Mason, the regular quote for those papers on the arena issue, has stated that Humphreys "is an outspoken opponent of stadium subsidies," and that he "has a world-class reputation." He is even speaking at the upcoming arena conference organized by Mason and hosted by the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and the University of Alberta. Why, then, given his proximity, expertise and reputation, has Humphreys been so thoroughly ignored in the many articles written in Edmonton's two dailies on the issue of a downtown arena? Is he always unavailable for comment? Is he super-duper busy? Is no one aware of his existence? Is he invisible? Or is it, as Eckstein discusses, simply a matter of bias?





*that's for you, Sac!