Jason Whitlock and the Boundaries of Journalism

“Journalism is our salvation. It is the cure for unfairness.” — Whitlock

These words come at the beginning of a 2,400-word blog post billed as “The Explanation 2.0.” The post is part of a process in which Jason Whitlock plans to discuss the failure of the race, culture and sports site ESPN hired him to create; his departure from the Worldwide Leader and his own social theory of race as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. He has since moved on to direct score-settling, which is less interesting.

Whitlock thinks true journalism can save our society, a thesis that many journalists (and observers of journalism) undoubtedly would agree with, at least in part. But Whitlock’s discourse on journalism is one in which non-journalists appear to play a starring rule.

Whitlock offers three examples of true journalism in his post. They are a work of fiction (The Wire), a work of scholarly research that has rightfully found a popular audience (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow) and his own work, stretched across a variety of outlets. Those who are outside of journalism appear to include The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates – whose case for reparations and discussion of the negative effects of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work on poverty in the 1960s are dismissed as fostering hopelessness among black people — and the “bullies” at the website Deadspin.

Deadspin has reported fairly deeply on Whitlock’s time at ESPN at a website that never really launched, including the detail that Coates turned down an offer to triple his salary at ESPN. Deadspin’s thesis has been that Whitlock’s personal politics prevented him from recruiting many of the talented young black journalists working today. Whitlock counters here that writers who view him as problematic have fallen victim to groupthink enforced by BLM and white hipsters that runs counter to the traditions of the black community. Other people can debate the truth of that. Whitlock, the defender of true journalistic values, casts himself as having been assailed by the punks and ne’er-do-wells that populate the Internet and that are perverting journalism.

Journalism is being abandoned and used to censor independent thought, demonize people who speak imprecisely and/or violate our constantly moving line of political correctness. Social-media-driven faux outrage dominates today’s journalism. Unseasoned, untrained, instant-gratification-seeking children are beginning to set our journalistic agenda.

The deployment of professional identity as a cudgel is actually a well-studied practice, which sociologists call boundary work. Members of a professional group articulate membership standards, although they are, in truth negotiating them with the public. Medicine and law are the classic examples. Increasingly, scholars are applying this idea to journalism. In an era in which reporters no longer have monopoly control over the dissemination of information, what now defines a journalist? The answer is in the articulation because there is no such thing as a journalist in nature. It is a constructed category, like most other categories. Journalism, in essence, is a thing we made up to take on the task of keeping people informed about the world. Its meaning is subject to change.

Whitlock’s post is a disjointed form of boundary work. He is at once articulating classic definitions of the journalist, with all the glorification of truth-seeking and independence that drew me into the business in college (and that make bloggers use obscene gestures while rolling their eyes). At the same time though, his articulation expands the category of journalist beyond all coherence. David Simon was a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, but the work Whitlock regularly cites is (great) fiction. Michelle Alexander is a lawyer and civil rights advocate, job categories in which truth-seeking is involved, but not ones that have ever been mistaken for journalism (lawyers would object strenuously to the demotion). I do not blame Whitlock for aligning himself with Simon and Alexander. But can that connection be journalistic?

If anyone with a pure heart and an independent spirit is a journalist, then what makes journalism distinct from academic research or scriptwriting? I think that’s an important question to answer if journalism is indeed capable of saving the world. If The Wire is journalism rather than social commentary, what do we call a journalism that substitutes essential truths for literal ones? Maybe journalism is changing to that point, though I’m not convinced. I’m also not sure I can accept a definition of journalism that includes The Wire but not The Case for Reparation.

It’s a conversation worth having, I guess. But it is a conversation that will be open to journalists and non-journalists alike, including the hipsters at Deadspin. I think that’s ultimately a positive, if the media is to serve the public.

Marshawn Lynch and what NFL media access is really about

It didn’t take long for Marshawn Lynch’s “I’m just here so I don’t get fined” routine from Super Bowl Media Day to become a meme. Take it away, Katy Perry:

Lynch, the Seattle star running back, has been engaged in a battle of wills with the media for years now over his reluctance to speak in group settings. He has explained why he feels that way.

“If you’re forced to do something, it’s not as good as if you choose to do it,” Lynch told NFL Media last week during an expansive interview, making an exception to his three (words) and out approach to answering questions from reporters. “So no, I won’t have a lot of interesting things to say. When you’re forced to do something and you know it, it kind of just takes away from the whole experience of what it could be if (it were) natural. So, I’ll probably give forced answers.”

And on Thursday he issued a final statement, saying that he had nothing to say and the demands that he talk said more about the press than him. It’s actually all entirely reasonable sounding, especially in contrast to this:

https://twitter.com/murphPPress/status/560507598043377665

Complaining about not getting a compelled quote from a football player in a media setting in which everyone is going to get the same material is a bad look.

Look, the media scrum has its value for the working reporter needing to get something out on deadline. No one is going to win a Pulitzer for anything gathered in a scrum. The NFL and its teams create countless scrums during the course of a season because they believe they are good for business. And when I say create, I mean compel.

Player media availability is not some favor that benevolent athletes grant to thirsty sportswriters. Media availability is a component of the communications strategy employed by a $10 billion corporation seeking to garner best news coverage possible. This was true when the NFL was fledgling entity and it is true now that the NFL is a behemoth. That is why media availability is written into player contracts. The league believes press coverage serves as marketing for the brand or, at the very least, reinforces the idea that the league is a systemically important cultural institution.

Every minute wasted trying to get something usable from Marshawn Lynch is a minute not spent getting something actually usable from Chris Nowinzki about head injuries, or talking to NFL players’ ex-wives about how the league has handled domestic violence or getting the real scoop on the NFL Commissioner. And even if you’re not inclined to do that and only want to write about the fun stuff, it’s also a minute spent not taking advantage of how overwhelmed the PR staffs are at the Super Bowl to do more reporting on people who don’t usually talk, and who don’t have the same levels of media polish.

Controlling the flow of information is one of the most basic media management strategies there is. Every reporter has a news quota they must fulfill to remain employed. Institutions that provide predictable streams of information to journalists are valuable to reporters, who can take that raw info and turn it into news. This Pavlovian response is not unique to sportswriters, although it is perhaps more open in sports media.

The NFL is great at managing information flows. During the season, players and coaches take questions from the media on a pretty consistent schedule (the head coach talks daily, the quarterback talks on Wednesday, there are conference calls with coaches and players from other teams, etc.). Reporters have a general idea of what they’re going to get in advance and can plan around that to meet their production requirements. This information is furnished for reporters. This does not mean it doesn’t have some value; I will read every sentence about how Reggie Bush’s knee is doing ahead of a game against the Jaguars. But it takes no discernable journalistic talent to gather that information. That’s sort of the point.

Good beat reporters develop information streams beyond what league media staffs provide. Beat writers are talking to agents, union officials, players’ families, even using public records and court documents, to get the information that isn’t being arranged for the purpose of garnering specific types of coverage. Good reporters manage these two streams, using them to ask better questions in contrived media settings like Media Day or contextualizing what the teams provide with independently gathered information. That’s the journalism part of sports journalism.

Reporters’ complaints about Marshawn Lynch probably reflect anxiety over their niche in the sports media ecosystem. Teams and leagues are already challenging traditional media’s informational role, creating their own newsgathering operations. Players communicate to fans through social media or things like the Players’ Tribune. So I can see why any threat to access would be met in some quarters by an angry response. Access separates insiders from outsiders, it justifies paychecks and a level of prestige for individual journalists. But it is important to remember the purpose of this access, and that isn’t really to make sure the press can do its job.

It is also important to remember that leagues cannot retreat to their preferred information channels if they want to continue to grow (and they do, Roger Goodell wants the league to grow to a $25 billion a year business). And if NFL news is only on the NFL Network or oaklandraiders.com, the league and its teams cannot claim a level of cultural importance that would justify, say, stadium subsidies or create a plausible reason that it is OK to play despite what we’re learning about concussions.

There may indeed come a day when newspapers no longer spend money to send reporters from Seattle to Miami for a weekend to cover a Week 5 game. That will be a sad day for sports journalism because I do think the game story and notebook serve a journalistic purpose. But it also will be a sad day for the Seattle Seahawks and the NFL. There is a reason that teams used to foot the bill for newspapers reporters to travel with them. Even in their diminished states, the Seattle Times and the Tacoma News-Tribune are going to reach more people than seahawks.com.

Access matters, of course it does. It can be a cooperative enterprise; reporters get stories without expending as much effort, players build their #brands, the league gets publicity and viewers get information they want about people and things they care about. Marshawn Lynch has opted out of this. But reporters can opt out too. They do not have to write about what is put in front of them for the purpose of being written about. And they certainly should not complain that not enough is being put in front of them.

The tantrums that a few media members are throwing about Lynch, the demand that he be produced for unproductive media availabilities, essentially are demands that the NFL be better at public relations. Why on earth would anyone want that?

Subjects and objects in media coverage

Everyone should read Jessica Luther’s argument for de-centering the athlete in coverage of campus sexual assaults committed by members of various sports teams. She rightly points out that when media place athletes who commit sexual assault at the center of narratives – rather than survivors, the idea of consent or institutional responsibilities – those stories are telling us to worry about who is going to play Saturday above all else. Serious crimes with terrible consequences are reduced to obstacles to be overcome or distractions from getting on with the serious business of winning.

What Luther describes in the context of sexual assault can be extended to the role of media in reproducing all manner of social inequality. Work in media sociology has illustrated the ways that professional practices and news routines tend to reinforce and extend power dynamics. Gaye Tuchman’s classic Making News describes the ways news organizations deploy resources to areas of a community where they believe news is likely to occur. In doing so, news organizations are making judgments about what matters within a community. We have cops and politics and sports reporters because that’s where journalists and editors and publishers and have decided is where news happens. This elevates them.

I view this process as the construction of subjects and objects. Subjects in media representations have power. Their perspectives are fully explored and their definitions of situations tend to become the dominant frames through which issues are discussed. Police have incredible definitional power. So do politicians and football coaches. Objects are acted upon. They are defined entirely by their relationship to a subject. This is not say that subjects get treated well in the media all the time. But they get to be full-fledged individuals whose motives and actions reporters fully reflect in coverage. In the long term, that is an advantageous position.

Jameis Winston is a subject. He won a Heisman Trophy and a National Championship as Florida State’s quarterback. He will be the central figure in multiple four-hour national television broadcasts on network television (not even the President gets that type of exposure). The woman who reported Winston raped her is not a subject in the normal course of media work. We don’t really know who she is, which means all sorts of motivations and personality traits can be attributed to her. In contrast, look at how Walt Bogdonovich covered a sexual assault investigation at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York. The piece generally is told from the point of view of the woman who brought the charges. Football is present, but secondary. Of course, most people don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the Hobart Statesmen or its players, although similarly strong reporting has been done at Florida State.

Yet the ways media cover sexual assault make perpetrators in the subjects and survivors the objects. It is obvious that a rape charge is going to look different to the accuser and the accused. Yet if we have a pre-existing, though parasocial, relationship with the accused person, and are hearing only from the accused person’s lawyer and coach during the investigation, and ultimately want to watch the accused person play sports, that is going to have an effect on how we view specific cases and sexual assault in general. Demanding that victims of sexual assault become public figures is unreasonable. The already high personal costs of reporting sexual assault are compounded by fame and provincial sports allegiances.

The challenge for sports journalism to take up these questions in ways that keep the playing field level. Luther points to the new CBS Sports Network show We Need to Talk, in which discussion of this issue included members of the all-woman panel discussing their own experiences with abuse. That’s certainly one way.  I don’t have a good prescription for others, but this is a discussion worth having.

That discussion should start with an understanding that sports journalists should never treat serious social issues as incursions on the fun and games. Sports are part of a society, not distinct from them. Issues are part of the entire package. Efforts to keep them separate are efforts to avoid hard topics. The routines of sports journalism are built around access and promotion. This is not necessarily problematic. We have decided a society that organized sports are important, which makes games and the people who play them meaningful topics for journalism. But sports journalists should approach their work with what David Rowe calls a problem orientation, a willingness to point out racism and sexism when it intersects with the playing field.

Games are fun, but there are other subjects to write about.

Men’s Health and the masculinization of data

A consistent punchline for the circles I tweet in is a terrible piece of clickbait from Men’s Health, since taken down, teaching men how to talk to women about sports. The magazine’s advice was to ignore statistics and tell women about the human stories, because women only care about emotions.

The premise is ridiculous. I want to stop, however, and look at the offhand divide the piece sets up, one in which data is masculine and story is feminine. Guess which one is valorized in this era of big data?

Achieving truth untainted by emotion is an Enlightenment value. Data feels like a really great way of doing this, and, in fact, using observational methods rather than logic to test propositions has been a really important advance. Sports have been a fruitful area for data-minded folks, and that approach has adopted by journalism at large. At the same time, judgments about rationality can be wielded as a weapon. Describing a person or a set of people as overly emotional, unable to grasp data, or unwilling to listen to reason is a really good way to marginalize them. It’s on the first page of the playbook for sexism, racism, ableism, and any other –ism you can name.

But the other thing it does is reinforce the idea that this masculine data is independent of storytelling in some way. This is also nonsense. Sports fandom is neither natural to men nor based in any way on objectivity. Sports are emotional and emotion is important.  It is entirely bound up in story, both those of the people who play the games mediated through the press, and in the way fans understand the experience of watching with each other.

When the TV crew flashes a batter’s hitting statistics on the screen, it is giving us a backstory of the person at the plate. Those numbers extend the drama. It’s not just team vs. team, batter vs. pitcher, but also batter vs. his own limits or his own past.

When the broadcaster says “Jones is hitting just .134 this season,” that is not simply stating Jones’ batting average, a factual datapoint. Rather the broadcaster is saying that Jones is bad at hitting, that it is unlikely he will get on base, that failure is imminent, that if anything good happens it will require a certain amount of serendipity. That is a story, just as surely as when the sideline reporter tells us about Jones’ daughter and her battle with cancer.

And the data being presented, the batting average, is more argument than truth. Batting average is a specific discourse about what makes for a good baseball player, but the basis for the statistic is that the guy back in the 1860s who thought it might be a good idea to keep data on baseball games valued base hits because they corresponded best with cricket skill. People who care about this use other metrics, like the rate a player makes it to first base, or the number of bases they get per hit. That doesn’t make batting average wrong. But it means our so-called objective descriptions of skill are actually a subjective story about baseball and personal achievement. These are culturally determined and not particularly objective.

A three-paragraph throwaway article in Men’s Health relies on a large degree of cultural agreement. An expression of common sense sexism is a reflection of those currents embedded in a society. The stakes are low when we talk about it in the context of sports. But gendering it there lets us get comfortable with that idea in other contexts, ones that block women from management roles and treat their absence in data fields as natural rather than the result of structural sexism. That’s why this matters.

#freesimmons and the valorization of the Hot Sports Take

On its face, it looks like ESPN suspended Bill Simmons, perhaps its most high-profile voice, for criticizing NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Here’s some of what Simmons said about Goodell on his weekly NFL gambling podcast via Awful Announcing:

I just think not enough is being made out of the fact that they knew about the tape and they knew what was on it. Goodell, if he didn’t know what was on that tape, he’s a liar. I’m just saying it. He is lying. I think that dude is lying. If you put him up on a lie detector test that guy would fail. For all these people to pretend they didn’t know is such f—— b——-. It really is — it’s such f—— b——-. And for him to go in that press conference and pretend otherwise, I was so insulted. I really was.

I really hope somebody calls me or emails me and says I’m in trouble for anything I say about Roger Goodell. Because if one person says that to me, I’m going public. You leave me alone. The commissioner’s a liar and I get to talk about that on my podcast … Please, call me and say I’m in trouble. I dare you.

So when ESPN announced a three-week Simmons suspension last night, the story seemed simple — this was the latest instance in which ESPN has let the NFL exert outsize influence over its content (Playmakers, Jacked Up, League of Denial, etc.).

But in the cold light of day, I’m not sure that story completely stands up to scrutiny. Here’s what is true: the NFL exerts major influence over ESPN because the network needs NFL broadcast rights to justify the subscriber fees it charges cable operators. CBS, Fox and NBC make back their rights fees (or some of them) through advertising. ESPN makes money on advertising, but also has a much more lucrative revenue stream through carriage fees. It means that every cable subscriber to a system that carries the channel is worth $5.54 to ESPN whether he or she cares about sports or not.  This is the highest subscriber fee in cable TV by far, and is justified in part because ESPN shows 17 Monday Night Football games a season. If the NFL, for whatever reason, decided to take those games to TNT or move them to the fledgling NBC Sports Network or keep them for the NFL Network, ESPN’s revenues would take an enormous hit. Cable operators would bargain for lower rates because keeping subscribers from baseball and basketball games is less fraught. So when the NFL wants something from ESPN, it usually gets it.

But if ESPN’s bosses had been primarily concerned with protecting Goodell, it is hard to explain the last two weeks of coverage, which was rightly praised by its ombudsman, the great Robert Lipsyte. ESPN has been really hard on Goodell both in its reporting and in its incorporation of critical voices into coverage. You might argue that the focus on Goodell actually insulates his 31 spectacularly wealthy bosses from their place in this picture. I think you’d be right. But that doesn’t really change the story.

Reporting today from The Big Lead suggests that ESPN was furious not at Simmons’ statement, but rather at his insistence that he was somehow above the brand. And when you think about it, the dare to ESPN brass was an attack on the journalistic orientation of the news side. I don’t think that was his intent, but it is how it came across. He is suggesting that ESPN somehow did not want to report on the NFL’s troubles and was trying to prevent its writers and editors from doing just that. Perhaps ESPN was telling its reporting staff to protect Goodell, but I’d like to see some proof of that.

ESPN’s suspension of Simmons makes the issue stupider (hot take). If ESPN suspended him for insulting a business partner, shame on it for letting the wall between news and programming slip. If ESPN suspended him in a show of corporate power shame on it for doing so in a way that poisons our sporting discourse. The more we mistake mere namecalling for speaking truth to power the worse off our spaces for discussion will be for it.

I don’t think there’s much in Simmons’ statement worth defending. Simmons’ initial statement was nothing more than a hot sports take. Whether Roger Goodell is a lying liar who lies about what videos he has and hasn’t watched is an empirical question, but not one that an opinion-merchant (and Simmons usually is one of the best) is at all equipped to answer. ESPN’s actual reporting suggests, at best, that the NFL and the Ravens went out of their ways not to fully know what happened between Ray and Janay Rice. Isn’t that worse than one guy being a liar? Doesn’t that suggest a rot in the corporate culture of the NFL and its member clubs? Doesn’t it suggest a complete blind spot on issues of domestic abuse (which go along with blind spots on head injuries, which predate Goodell’s tenure). The league and its teams have access to massive public funds, both locally and through tax exempt status, doesn’t this mismanagement raise questions about the wisdom about those expenditures? Goodell matters a little bit, but he is frontman for a league that matters a lot.

So yes, #freesimmons, but so he can actually talk about why sports matter and not just call people names.

The Paranoid Style in American Sports Fandom

Friday afternoon, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finally broke his silence on the league’s approach to domestic violence. It did not go well

BREAKING: NFL RELEASES NEW LOGO –> pic.twitter.com/f9AplnaPxF

— Maury Brown (@BizballMaury) September 19, 2014

Yet moments afterward, ESPN released a story saying the Ravens had full knowledge of what was on the infamous elevator tape as early as February. Ray Rice’s legal strategy was built around trying to prevent that tape, which Rice’s lawyer described as “fucking horrible” from seeing the light of day. The Ravens appear to have done all in their power not to see the tape. We all now know about its confirmatory power because the team cut ties with Rice just hours after TMZ posted it.

The timing all seemed a little too convenient for some people

The ESPN story on the Ravens is excellent, but I'd love to know the story behind the story on the precise timing of its publication.

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) September 19, 2014

And on the Baltimore Ravens’ message board this theory was floated

Russell Street Report, a Ravens blog, saw conspiracy in this. The idea was that ESPN published the story at the moment it did in order to protect Roger Goodell and the NFL and shift blame to the Ravens franchise:

(Kevin) Van Valkenburg (who co-bylined the story) is a personal favorite of mine and it was an excellent move on the part of ESPN.com to choose him to be involved in the story given his connectivity to Baltimore, the Ravens and Ray Rice with whom he is known to have at least had a close relationship.

Yet all of those things make Van Valkenburg the perfect weapon to cast the Ravens in the role of scapegoat.

Think about this…

The NFL is a HUGE business partner of ESPN. They are not business partners of the Baltimore Ravens.

By protecting the shield wouldn’t ESPN be protecting a significant revenue stream?

Isn’t it possible that Van Valkenburg’s lengthy expose’ is part of a concerted effort between the league, its owners and ESPN to redirect blame towards the Ravens?

I suppose anything is possible, if wildly improbable, and other parts of ESPN have bowed to NFL pressure in the past. A lot centered on Kevin Van Valkenburg, one of the two writers of the piece, who has a long history in Baltimore.

Might be tough to paint me as some Raven hater. http://t.co/UWknU18dgY http://t.co/1bEvaeyu7i http://t.co/3hRlZ1CXii http://t.co/TqwpHZYCe2

— Kevin Van Valkenburg (@KVanValkenburg) September 20, 2014

Oh, and there's these too. http://t.co/E5Snrsgcrq http://t.co/w7eP6pKXz3 http://t.co/rC3VBUQgEO http://t.co/1t0WWO5zM5

— Kevin Van Valkenburg (@KVanValkenburg) September 20, 2014

This provides us with an interesting object lesson in how perception is always selective. Sports fandom is a strong social identity. For Ravens fans encountering this news, the task is to assimilate this new information into a world view that maintains identification with the team. To be fair, many of the posts on the Ravens boards (This starts on page 103 of a thread that is still growing) are well-reasoned and grapple with the report in interesting and intellectually honest ways. Others display evidence of the hostile media effect, in which an individual views the source of negative information as biased against their side. And other show the hallmarks of social identity theory, in which people view everything through the prism of their own affiliations. Of course this works in other directions as well. Fans of Van Valkenburg’s work might be more willing to take it as credible given their previous associations

Someone is wrong on the Internet (it’s about Michael Sam)

I’d never heard of Matt Walsh before today, but it seems he’s a blogger, and he doesn’t like Michael Sam very much. His self-proclaimed “homophobic rant” made it into my Facebook feed, where somebody called it “brilliant.” As an educator-in-training, I felt it my duty to explain the ways in which Wash’s rant is the opposite of brilliant (dim). This will be a post in the style of Fire Joe Morgan; Walsh’s words are in bold and mine are in plain-text.

Michael Sam and how the NFL mostly is what it said it was

I followed the final rounds of the NFL Draft unusually closely today, wondering when and if Michael Sam would be drafted. After Sam announced he was gay in February, many anticipated that he would become the first openly gay player in the nation’s most popular sport. Projected as high as a third-round pick before the announcement, his draft stock plummeted in the subsequent months. The SEC Defensive Player of the Year lasted until the eighth-to-last pick in a draft in which 256 players were selected. I don’t wish to minimize the significance of having an out NFL player, especially after the reaction by some anonymous team personnel after Sam’s announcement–but I don’t wish to maximize it either.

As names were called throughout the afternoon, many questioned what it would mean if 256 picks passed and the openly gay player with the serious credentials were passed over. No single team’s decision is really a sign of anything, but the general feeling was that 32 teams passing on Sam several times would be an expression of institutional homophobia within the NFL. I would have seen it as a major indictment of NFL culture. I’m not sure that Sam falling as far as he did is really much better.

And now it is time to cue the inevitable question … But what about all the straight players not getting drafted?

https://twitter.com/WorldofIsaac/status/465257412430032896

Max Bullough, to whom the tweet refers, signed as an undrafted free agent with Houston shortly after the final selection. Bullough played for Rose Bowl Champions Michigan State, but was suspended for the game for still undisclosed reasons.  Bullough had been projected to go in the fourth or fifth round. It is impossible to say whether the suspension played a role in his being drafted. Similarly, it is impossible to say whether Michael Sam’s sexuality led to his tumble down the draft boards — poor workouts and an unclear position at the pro level probably mattered too.  I will simply note that 23 players graded below Michael Sam by NFL.com and 38 players rated the same as Sam were picked before him, including one player in the second round. My guess is that teams filed Bullough’s unspecific issues in college and Sam’s sexuality under same category of “red flag” — a term referring to concerns about a player independent of his pure talent. In Sam’s case the red flag likely was phrased as being a “distraction” or causing a “media circus.”

Several NFL sources say one team removed Michael Sam from its board fearing he'd be a distraction. They wouldn't identify the team. #Dumb

— mike freeman (@mikefreemanNFL) May 11, 2014

If Freeman is right, Sam’s draft position is a function of some teams being homophobic and some teams exploiting those other teams’ homophobia. A team that was ready to pay good money for Sam could count on scooping him up for a fraction of the cost. He’ll make less due to the rookie salary scale if he makes the team. And there’s no guarantee he will make the Rams’ roster. Seventh rounds picks are guaranteed nothing.

And now it’s time to cue the inevitable and ugly discourse about so-called political correctness…

Still maintain NFL would prefer Sam get drafted, just to quiet the PR noise. Goodell on the phone w/friendly GM or two? "Do me a solid??"

— Kent Babb (@kentbabb) May 10, 2014

This is a symbolically important day. It is a victory for Michael Sam and all the people who worked with him during the past four months. It feels momentous when ESPN shows Sam plant one on his boyfriend for the cameras. I am happy for Michael Sam and hope he succeeds. All progress is important, but this was two yards on first-and-10. An openly gay man will be paid less than worse-qualified straight men to do the same job (per nfl.com). The league will make multiple times his salary on jersey sales this week alone. And the open homophobia that still is a common feature in team meeting rooms seems to exist unchallenged. The onus is on the NFL to prove that its culture can change.

Donald Sterling is Al Capone

In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in housing. At the time, housing segregation was codified through passages in deeds specifying the race of the subsequent purchaser of a property. With overt housing discrimination illegal, segregation was achieved by other means. In an aside in Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig discusses the ways built environments and zoning laws were put to work so whites could avoid living with blacks.  As others have noted, the building of suburbs can be understood as an enormous transfer of public money that largely benefited those engaged in white flight. The effects of residential segregation are generational in that they prevent the concentrations of wealth in communities that lead to improved public services and combat some sources of social stratification. Middle-class black had to pay more for homes because of diminished supply, counteracting a lot of the benefits that come from middle-class salaries. Residential segregation, therefore, is an expression of white supremacy, a tool for systematically denying people of color access to the American Dream. It is one of the ongoing evils in American society, although one buried under the ideal of consumer choice. So when you read that Los Angeles real estate mogul Donald Sterling (who until yesterday was an NBA team owner in good standing) paid multiple multi-million dollar settlements in housing discrimination cases, it is important to understand what that actually means in the larger currents of history.

The point, then, is that Sterling finally being banished from polite society over a vile cartoonish racist rant leaked to a gossip website is a little bit like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion. Sterling received a lifetime ban from new NBA commissioner Adam Silver. The ban touched off a lovefest in the NBA. As I watched the Warriors-Clippers last night, praiseworthy tweets from important cultural figures scrolled along the bottom of the screen.

The lifetime ban came with a promise to hold a vote to force him out of the NBA. If NBA owners oust Sterling, it will not because of Sterling’s racism. They worked around that for years. It will be because he was costing them money and goodwill. And it will be because their workforce demanded swift and severe action under the threat of destroying the integrity of the playoffs. In a 30-way partnership, there seems no reason to tolerate 1/30th of it destroying your hard-won market position. All other side issues are irrelevant to this particular situation.

But as repugnant as Sterling is, it would be wrong for him to come to represent the face of American racism. The Sterling affair must not be reduced to another post-racial fairy tale, where we celebrate how broad and righteous outrage took down an obvious villain and closes off any sort of discussion we might have about how Donald Sterling came to be in possession of an NBA franchise, how some NBA owners amassed their billions, and how the NBA put Sterling’s Clippers in a position to be relevant this year. Sterling is the racial covenant in this story. Everyone knows enough to shun that.

It is more challenging to write about the ways Sterling’s views like this one are actually pretty pervasive:

I support (Clippers players) and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?

This view of athletes and the place of a team owner should be understood as the zoning laws and conveniently placed placed freeways in our story. In the context of Sterling’s rant, the bigotry is obvious. This is an owner speaking the language of gifts, rather than understanding the ways he profits from people’s work. This denigrates the role of labor in general and athletes in particular.  Columnists and fans who think overpaid athletes should just shut up and enjoy the tenuous perks of their position rather than seek to improve their situations are channeling Sterling’s sentiments. So are those who praise the paternalism of certain executives and coaches. So are those who refuse to see athletics as a real form of work, even at the pro level.  These beliefs are not developed in a vacuum. They are the result of messages about what is valued in society and judgments about the people who tend to occupy those positions.

#askemmert was silly and a disaster but the NCAA is winning anyway

NCAA president Mark Emmert appeared on ESPN’s Mike and Mike radio show this morning. To add a little interactivity to his appearance, listeners were invited to submit questions using the #askemmert hashtag. In the grand tradition of #askjpm, it did not go well.

https://twitter.com/wiltonpsmith/status/457227399206567936

https://twitter.com/ohholybutt/statuses/457138508206194691

#AskEmmert if these institutions are more abt education how comes these coaches make 5 to 10 times more than the professors

— Realstarman (@seihbangs) April 18, 2014

https://twitter.com/justRVB/statuses/457131852512260096

After a Twitter thrashing like that, I bet the NCAA turns off the lights tomorrow. Or not.

ESPN’s report on Emmert’s appearance leaves out the hashtag trolling and portrays Emmert as a voice of reason saying that drawing a distinction between meals and snacks was obviously absurd, so of course they changed that rule.  Now, the rule was only changed after University of Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier told reporters at the Final Four that he goes to bed hungry some nights because he can’t afford to buy food.  This whole thing — a doomed hashtag, a sudden change to a seemingly silly rule about food, a public appearances by the NCAA’s boss feels like the deployment of a crisis communications plan. There are some lessons here about how to use social media if your brand is lousy, which is to say that Twitter engagement is not always a great idea.

That said, we should be clear on why Napier’s statement constituted an immediate crisis. It is tempting to say that this is actually about the Northwestern Football unionization drive, which comes to a vote next week. But the response actually seems a step removed from that. Unionization will eventually play out in venues that are subject to public opinion on some level or other.

What the NCAA needs to protect is the idea that student-athletes, in the parlance of the NCAA, are getting the deal of a lifetime. They get to play a sport on a huge stage (while generating just a few billions for the various groups that make money off college sports) in return for totally free college education (we will leave aside the ways in which the education is not actually free). The idea that this is a privilege is extremely uncontroversial among sports fans, according to Marist’s Center for Sports Communication. It released a poll in March showing that a large majority of sports fans do not think revenue-sport college athletes should be paid, and by an even larger margin do not think they should have the right to unionize (Crosstab data suggest that actually support for these ideas breaks down along racial lines, which is another post). Star players starving while coaches earn seven-figure checks might cut into these figures over time. Frankly, as long as the NCAA is a offering something that a majority thinks is great, players will have difficulty mobilizing for rights on the job.

The Twitter engagement campaign looks dumb when you see Emmert being insulted, but it’s actually sneakily smart. Addressing a specific criticism of a dumb rule is meant to stand in for an overall responsiveness to student concerns. But mass revulsion to the NCAA model just isn’t there. Napier identified a specific flaw and the NCAA addressed it. If you think the deal athletes get is a good one (which puts you in the majority of sports fans), then you’re happy that this one bad thing in an otherwise great situation has been addressed.

The point here is that Twitter is not the same as the world at large, even in sports, where Twitter is actually an increasingly established fandom practice. The NCAA has problems more severe than people saying mean things on Twitter.