Imagine the scenario: North University and South College are bitter rivals, dating back 75 years. When the schools play each other in football each season, the game attracts hundreds of thousands of fans, alumni and current students, not only to the game but also to the campus itself.

Parties start days before kickoff, the game is hyped in the local media, and by game day the desire to win has reached a fevered pitch.

When North beats South on a last-minute field goal, the fans jump out of their seats and storm the field. The throngs of people spill out of the stadium onto the campus. There's no way to control the crowds and the celebration quickly gets out of hand with fighting, extensive property damage and eventually an all-out riot that ends with numerous fans taken to the hospitals and countless arrests.

So what's the lead story in the next day's paper -- the game or the riot? And does the media bear any responsibility for the poor sportsmanship and negative fan behavior by hyping the game and then repeatedly writing stories and showing footage of any rioting?

"Whether (the media) has responsibility or not, they certainly have an impact," said Wally Renfro, NCAA senior advisor for communications. "The job of the media is to report news, and what makes news is going to be those things that are unusual, impactful, controversial and that reflect change, so the issue of a riot is going to be news -- it just flat is."

Renfro acknowledges that it is the media's right to have the freedom to report as they see fit. He calls freedom of the press a liberty that must be protected and not challenged.

Others say the fault for these situations lies squarely in the shoulders of the universities.

"The schools are the ones who choose to create these massive events that get people hyped up and they permit partying to go on for hours, and often days, before the event itself," said Welch Suggs, senior editor-athletics for The Chronicle of Higher Education. "They reap everything they sow when these things happen."

Reporters discredit the notion that they look for "bad" news and glorify the negative events, while shunning the positive ones.

"We don't look at it as good news or bad news," said Keith Robinson, the Associated Press bureau chief in Indianapolis. "We just look at it as news."

USA Today's Steve Wieberg agrees. "It's not our job to cast college athletics or any sports entity in a positive light. It's our job to cover the news and to write stories that people are interested in reading. Sometimes those are Baylor and sometimes they're Neil Parry at San Jose State."

Gary Hill, chair of the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists and director of investigations and special segments at KSTP television in Minneapolis/St. Paul, noted that when looking at the situation, one needs to differentiate between local and national media. National media, he said, are more likely to cover only the riot, while local media will cover not only the riot, but the after-effects, such as what happened to those arrested and steps the community and university take to guard against future riots.

Hill said that when there were riots after the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, won the Men's Frozen Four, his station reported extensively on the incident long after the rioting ended. The station reported on the jail sentences received by rioters, the university's policy changes and all other issues related to the riots.

"If you look at it on a national basis, when something like the Minnesota riot happens, it goes national, everybody sees that and they probably never follow through," he said. "The national news has a real short attention span for anything other than Michael Jackson -- to their detriment. If you only show the burning cars in the street, then you do a disservice."

Hill said it's also not uncommon for the public to turn against the media when a newspaper or broadcaster reports negative news about a favorite school or athlete.

For example, he cited the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which uncovered a widespread cheating scandal a few years ago at Minnesota. The newspaper reported on it before the NCAA basketball tournament, resulting in the benching of some basketball players and hurting the Gophers' chances. The public cried foul.

More than 1,000 people canceled subscriptions. The governor even held a news conference accusing the paper of timing the story to intentionally hurt the team, Hill said.

"In terms of sports in this country, what other industry gets as much adulation from the media as sporting events?" he said. "You have news, weather and sports. Five minutes a night of sports, just kind of doting on athletes. It's a huge industry. The NCAA, the colleges, the pros all benefit enormously from the positive attention that's lavished on them every night by broadcasters.

"If you did a minute-by-minute analysis of what you would call positive coverage," he said, "the positive coverage is going to far outweigh the negative."

-- Beth Rosenberg