Red Press Box, Blue Press Box

This is an age in which the power of the press box in Sports is waning. More people than ever are contributing to our sporting discourse, which is good and proper. So it seems a little odd to be enmeshed in a discussion about the political leanings of the diminishing number of elite sports writers.

But we are, and apparently, they’re all liberals now, writes Bryan Curtis. Maybe they always were, although my experience in sports media suggests not. Either way, the contemporary elite sportswriter is likely to talk politics on Twitter and elsewhere.

Conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that the liberalism of sports journalism is actually managerialism. Rather than challenging the status quo, he says left-leaning sports reporters have adopted a view of sports that reinforces, rather than challenges, the power of the bosses. The larger argument is a case for conservatism as a stance toward the world (as distinct from the Milo-infused political movement we have come to know and spend our time blocking on Twitter). Where Curtis suggests that writers have adopted the perspectives of players and moved left, Dougherty thinks they are a new version of the tech press that venerates the geniuses in charge. Rather than liberal, sportswriting has become a techno-libertarian profession.

The buzzword of the techno-libertarian is disruption, which is often a political force masquerading as value-free technological or economic progress. In reality disruption alters distributions of wealth and power. This can be good or bad depending on the effects; but disruption for its own sake is the ideology of psychopaths. As a conservative, Dougherty wants us to see how tradition could theoretically provide a set of resources for people resisting disruptive change. This is not wrong, although it takes a benign view of nostalgia. Too often, however, tradition operates as a bulwark against addressing injustice. I grant that injustice can be hard to accept as a problem in contemporary sports culture, but it’s not exactly far below the surface.

If overtly political sports journalism is the hot new trend, I think it is less a reflection of the profession and more about the way news organizations and journalists chase audiences. The onus is now on sports reporters to generate a following in the social media world, which research has shown helps them establish credibility. Some sportswriters talk about their kids online. Others about Bruce Springsteen. And others about politics. If it seeps into coverage, well, that is part of the same story. The traditional output of the sportswriter, game stories and notebooks, are holdovers from a print-only era sports journalism. They do not generate many clicks. For example: this is a perfectly acceptable beat story and I care deeply about Giannis Antetokoumpo’s excitement level about the second half of the season.  I also know I’m part of one of the smallest fan bases in the NBA. That story had seven Facebook shares when I linked it.

When Jabari Parker praised the Bucks’ decision to stop staying in Trump hotels back in November, the story got more than 1,200 shares. Charles F. Gardiner was reporting, not giving a hot Trump take. But that story did better online because it crossed over from the traditional sports audience to a general readership. We are no longer in the days in which writing about the tribulations Jackie Robinson faced on the road with the Dodgers earned Roger Kahn a telegram from the desk reading “Write sports not politics.” Now that same telegram would be a text message and it would have said, get more clicks or get a new job.

Sports reporters are no longer just writing for a local audience that was potentially more conservative that the general population. They are writing for the entire Internet-connected world. Bucks fans constitute a small audience. The union of Bucks fans and politics fans make up a larger one.

Former ESPN Ombudsman Robert Lipsyte said that he saw many complaints from viewers after the network showed Michael Sam kissing his same-sex partner to celebrate his drafting by the then-St. Louis Rams.

Lipsyte said those who complained felt they were being forced to confront what they viewed as a political issue in what they felt should be an apolitical space. But what space can be apolitical? What spaces are not shaped entirely by the social forces and arguments that make up our political life?

When people say politics should be separate from sports, I think are leaving out the word “oppositional” to modify politics. A football game that starts with a national anthem and an Air Force flyover cannot possibly be divorced from nationalism and militarism. A stadium built with public funds represents a series of political choices. A professional sport in which most of the players receive their vocational training in public institutions represents political choices. A football game in which most of the players will lack the longterm access to health insurance to treat the lingering effects of playing represents political choices. But if politics are the means by which we contest distributions of wealth and power, then demanding a space free of those is a call to preserve the status quo. That is a political choice too. There is no hiding from politics in the stadium.

That sports fails to transcend politics is not a knock on sports. Nothing transcends politics. That sports has all the social ills that infect the rest of the world does not make sports bad or wrong. And it does not mean that every article about a sporting event should be calling for Full Communism.

Rather it means when these issues become salient, sports journalists cannot duck them. The word “journalist” in the job title is just as important as “sports.” If news organizations are going to devote resources to sports, they should not just be producing hagiographies of players and coaches. They should be looking at the whole picture, the good and the bad. In this case the economic imperative and the ethical one match up. If that reads as liberal that may be because many levers of power are controlled by not particularly liberal people right now. But sports journalism operates on a limited political spectrum.

Funneling everything through the left-right prism is not particularly helpful here, because those are not fixed points on the political compass. The electoral system is a very limited way to think about politics anyway and certainly ignores social movements and some of the truly oppositional voices. Many sportswriters are problematizing the Washington football team’s mascot, but virtually no one is asking whether the system of private team ownership that allows one man to make this decision is OK.  People are arguing for greater gender equality in sports. But few sportswriters question whether the norm of gender segregation is overused; why have gender-specific competition in sports like curling or archery or equestrian? These questions have often been the province of writers outside the mainstream, especially writers who are not white men.

Meanwhile, I just saw an ESPN Interview with Mike “I’m a Man, I’m 40” Gundy about his haircut that included the chryon “Calls his mullet the Arkansas Waterfall” so maybe the political overtones of modern sports media are slightly overstated.