Reaction around the sports media world was swift and, mostly, extremely critical of Monahan, who seems to have cut this deal without speaking to the players. Mind you, many big-time PGA Tour players such as Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas turned down hundreds of millions to stick with the tour — all along, defending it and clashing with other golfers.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay wrote, “After shaming players for taking the money, the PGA Tour is … taking the money.”
The late TV executive Don Ohlmeyer famously used to say, “The answer to all your questions is money.” And that’s certainly what this came down to. Money.
Gay wrote, “The public, meanwhile, will be asked to forget that the past year ever happened. Golf’s conscience has driven straight off the high road and is doing doughnuts in the club parking lot. You’re going to hear the word ‘hypocrisy’ so much in the coming weeks you’re going to want to banish it like a belly putter.”
Speaking on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” ESPN’s Mina Kimes said that Monahan managed to “sell out morally and also sell out his own constituency at the same time, which is truly remarkable.”
Kimes added, “Put yourselves in the shoes of a PGA golfer who turned down LIV money. Over the past year-plus, you believed you were taking a principled stand. You have watched your peers accept, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars to link arms with a regime with a terrible human rights record. You have spoken out against that record. And you have been told, yours is a player-run organization. Today, you wake up and you realize that was all a lie.”
Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel blasted the PGA, writing, “The PGA Tour — the pure, pure, ethically-minded PGA Tour — was about freedom and human rights. It was completely against torture and abuses and certainly sportswashing, which is when bad people use the positives of competition to make themselves seem less bad. The PGA Tour — the pure, pure, ethically-minded PGA Tour — were the supposed heroes on the front line, maybe the last honest and upstanding enterprise on earth, as it tried to fend off the Saudi-funded LIV Golf tour. That’s how they told it. Well, at least, until the money got good enough to sell out.”
Even Monahan seems to know he’s in for plenty of criticism. He met with the players in a meeting he called “intense” and “heated.” One player, Geoff Ogilvy, told the Golf Channel, “I’m glad I wasn’t Jay today.”
Monahan told reporters, “I recognize everything I’ve said in the past in my past positions. I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. Anytime I said anything I said it with the information I had in the moment.”
To say LIV Golf was barely making a ripple on TV is to overstate the impact of a ripple. It has a deal with the CW, but only a few hundred thousand people were tuning in each week. It got so bad that LIV stopped announcing its TV numbers.
So why did Monahan look to merge? He said he is looking at the long-term future of golf. What he didn’t say is he might have gotten nervous about litigation. And, again, the answer to all your questions is money.
But two things now remain to be seen from a media aspect: How dogged, persistent and inquisitive will golf journalists be moving forward, particularly on this story? And how will the networks, which didn’t hesitate to take little potshots at LIV, handle things from now on?
CNN’s messy leftovers
The leftovers from Tim Alberta’s big profile of CNN boss Chris Licht in The Atlantic continue to get messier. Licht apologized to CNN staff on Monday and said he is going to “fight like hell” to gain their trust.
But is it too late for Licht? This isn’t just about The Atlantic article (although that didn’t help) but about several things: poor ratings, low morale and that disastrous Donald Trump town hall.
In his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote, “In the wake of The Atlantic's explosive story, I've spoken with dozens of staffers across the company. There are a wide range of emotions coursing through the halls of CNN. Some staffers are frustrated. Others are angry. Many are sad about the awful state of affairs that has taken hold of an organization they love. There is one near-universal sentiment, however, that has been communicated to me: Licht has lost the room.”
Based on their sourcing, The Wall Street Journal’s Isabella Simonetti and Joe Flint wrote, “Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper are among the CNN personalities who have voiced their concerns about Licht’s leadership, some explaining their views during conversations with incoming CNN Chief Operating Officer David Leavy.”
However, Darcy did note that Licht struck the right tone in his mea culpa to staff during his Monday editorial call.
Meanwhile, Axios’ Sara Fischer wrote, “The network was already under enormous stress following years of corporate mergers, product pivots and evaporating cable viewership. The latest saga calls into question how prepared the network will be to cover the 2024 elections — typically its most lucrative programming opportunity — and whether it's prepared for the eventual collapse of the cable bundle.”
But as far as staff? Darcy wrote, “In the eyes of so many at CNN, there isn't anything Licht can do at this point to win over their support. They've hit the wall with him.”
And even though it appears, at the moment, that Licht has the support of his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Darcy wrote, “Zaslav, I'm told, understands the dire state of affairs at his news network. He wouldn't have dispatched his top lieutenant before the publication of The Atlantic piece if he did not believe there was a problem. And the publication of the magazine's article added gasoline to the raging fire. … Whether CNN's corporate ownership will force a change remains to be seen. Several media executives that I have spoken with in recent days have all said that it is hard to see how Zaslav doesn't do something.”
A small town hall
In case you didn’t notice — and based on the numbers, most of you didn’t — CNN had a town hall with another Republican presidential candidate over the weekend. On Sunday night, it hosted former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. It was much less controversial than the town hall CNN did with Donald Trump. And it had way fewer viewers, as well — about 83% fewer, in fact.
While Trump’s town hall attracted around 3.3 million viewers, Haley’s town hall had only 562,000. But, for what it’s worth, CNN won the night against other cable news networks in the key 25-54 demographic.
Speaking of which …
