The thing is that regardless of how the public feels, the public "average" could be skewing towards wrong. I am strong supporter of socially liberal initiatives so long as they stay out of the homes and the temples. You know, don't infringe on reasonable personal and religious privacy...other than that, lets make the public world a commons fit for all different types of people.
Well now that's the crux of the debate isn't it. Who get's to define what "wrong" is?
With many of the social issues of our time, it's mostly a matter of opinion or feeling, unless there is an underlying religious precept at the core. In that sense, you can't define it as "wrong" and neither could I, at least not as individuals, so if a large majority are "average" in a belief system and the sports media is outside of that, it's really the media which are out of line with mainstream and not the opposite.
This is the danger of moral relativism, and why many feel it's best if the government, especially the federal government, stays out of moral debates and policies and not try to define what's "wrong" unless it's physically damaging to others.
Most people apparently feel the same way about journalists as a broad category, likely because most don't truly have depth or experience in the subjects they try to cover and why most journo's stray away from real analysis (or when they try they fail - my stats professor at UA used to bring in the USA today and NYT and show us examples of what not to do in analysis and stats and he had new material in every class from that days paper. He'd tell us if we ever did work that poor he'd walk us out of the class) and more toward social issues which can't be quantified and even then they typically do a horrible job with anything related to analysis/numbers/facts. This is even more true for sports journo's when they wander outside of the realm of the sports they should be covering.
