[They say, “Hey, we’re going to have the best sports coverage
in the world.” After you fire or reassign all your sports reporters?
That’s how you make the step to have the best sports coverage in the
world?]
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‘THE ATHLETIC IS THE NEGATION OF LOCAL SPORTS COVERAGE’  
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Janine Jackson interviews Dave Zirin
August 2, 2023
FAIR
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_ They say, “Hey, we’re going to have the best sports coverage in
the world.” After you fire or reassign all your sports reporters?
That’s how you make the step to have the best sports coverage in the
world? _

,

 

JANINE JACKSON: Earlier this month, the NEW YORK TIMES made
an announcement
[[link removed]]: The
paper has a plan, they said, to “become a global leader in sports
journalism.” Weirdly, the statement accompanied the news that
the TIMES is shutting down its sports page. TIMES sports coverage
is now in the hands of something called the ATHLETIC, a sports
website and app that the TIMES purchased
[[link removed]] a
year and a half ago.

ATHLETIC co-founder Alex Mather explained his outfit’s aspirations
in a 2017 interview
[[link removed]] with,
as it happens, the NEW YORK TIMES:

We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed
until we are the last one standing. We will suck them dry of their
best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult
for them.

An ATHLETIC editor tweeted
[[link removed]] a week or
so ago, “Don’t be fooled by the cranky ‘sports journalism is
dying’ tweets. The future has never been brighter.” The future
of _what_, exactly, you might ask.

Dave Zirin is sports editor at THE NATION
[[link removed]] as well as host of
the EDGE OF SPORTS [[link removed]] podcast. He’s
author of a number of books, most recently _The Kaepernick Effect_
[[link removed]]_: Taking a Knee,
Changing the World_, and he’s a writer/producer of the new
documentary _Behind the Shield_
[[link removed]]_: The Power and Politics of
the NFL_. He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park, Maryland. Welcome
back to COUNTERSPIN, Dave Zirin.

DAVE ZIRIN: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Nation: The End of the New York Times Sports Page Is a Tragedy]

_THE NATION (7/14/23
[[link removed]])_

JJ: Let me ask you, I guess, to start with what you see being lost.
Not everything is worth preserving, of course, and not everything new
is bad, but this decision represents more than, well, you might want
to look somewhere else for box scores, yeah?

DZ: Yeah. I mean, we’ve been losing local coverage all over the
country in the world of sports. Now, what does that mean? It doesn’t
just mean that your local high school doesn’t get the attention it
deserves, although, frankly, that is something.

It also means that all of the local scandals that invariably arrive
through sports, whether it’s the public funding of stadiums and all
the skullduggery [[link removed]] that goes on with
that, whether it’s the cozy relationships between political
officials and team owners, whether it’s bad behavior
[[link removed]] by
players in a public setting that in some way, shape or form endangers
the public: All of these things are a product of local reporting, in
terms of informing the public who these people are that we’re
cheering for and what these teams represent that we’re cheering for.

The ascension of the ATHLETIC is the negation of that kind of local
sports coverage. It’s basically, even though it has a lot of
talented reporters, many of whom are my colleagues and friends, a
hedge fund posing as a sports operation that aims to hurt local sports
pages all over the country.

And the issue here: It’s not just about the quality of the NEW YORK
TIMES sports page historically, it’s not just about its Pulitzer
Prizes and assorted awards or names that I grew up with, the Dave
Andersons
[[link removed]],
the Harvey Aratons [[link removed]], the Red
Smiths [[link removed]], for
goodness’ sake, the Bob Lipsytes
[[link removed]], these legendary
names—Selena Roberts
[[link removed]], Sonja
Steptoe [[link removed]]. It’s not just
about that.

It’s the fact that it’s the industry leader, the NEW YORK TIMES,
it really signals how dire the situation is nationally.

JJ: And it sounds like there’s things to know, you’ve started to
tell us, that we need to know about the ATHLETIC in particular, and
the kind of rules by which they run their operation.

DZ: Yeah, it’s a union-busting operation
[[link removed]],
and it’s about presenting itself as a possibility for outsourcing
for your local media baron that is having union troubles. We just saw
this in the NEW YORK TIMES, where the NEW YORK TIMES workers, they
stood together strong. The journalists stood together. I believe it
was a one-day strike
[[link removed]].
Correct me if I’m wrong.

JJ: I believe so.

[Dave Zirin]

_Dave Zirin: “When you get rid of local coverage, what you also get
rid of is the watchdog that is so important…. It’s not all fun and
games.”_

DZ: And what it did was, it put the Sulzbergers and company back on
their heels. What do they do in response to that? Oh gee, by sheer
coincidence, hey, we’re shutting down a section of the newspaper, of
course populated by Guild workers, union workers, and we’re
replacing it with this non-union operation that, frankly, we’re
already paying for. And we’re going to put it under the guise of, as
Sulzberger said, this is going to make us the leader in sports.

So these people live in Bizarro World, the Superman world where
everything is opposite. So they say, “Hey, we’re going to have the
best sports coverage in the world.” After you fire or reassign all
your sports reporters? That’s how you make the step to have the best
sports coverage in the world?

But no, they’ll say, we have the ATHLETIC, it’s a national
operation. But as I said earlier, especially when you’re talking
about the city of New York, when you get rid of local coverage, what
you also get rid of is the watchdog that is so important, because of
the corruption so endemic to the business of organized sports. It’s
not all fun and games.

JJ: Some of the conversation makes it seem as though people really
just were looking for scores from last night’s games. If that’s
all you think sports coverage is, well then maybe nothing’s being
lost. But that isn’t what it can be, and that isn’t what it is at
its best.

And then another thing that was noted in this 2017 NEW YORK
TIMES piece, and it’s been noted elsewhere—I like the way it was
described, so I’ll use that quote: “They don’t hew to
traditional, they would say antiquated, norms” about editorial
independence. They have deals with teams, they have ties to gambling
apps, and that’s out of the same mouth that they’re talking about
quality journalism.

DZ: Amazing. And the infestation of the gambling apps, which I have
described on other
[[link removed]] occasions
[[link removed]],
is really nothing more than a regressive tax on sports fans, and
preying on addiction issues that exist in the general populace, for
the broader purpose of further filling the coffers of organized
sports. I mean, this has been an economic boom for organized sports.

And it’s the similar mentality of the hedge fund that is really
running the ATHLETIC, it’s the hedge fund mentality that says,
where is profit to be found? It’s not to be found in creating,
it’s not to be found in jobs. Profit is to be found by picking the
meat off the bones of what’s left. It’s declinism writ large.

So to fund the gambling that’s done by fans, which further funds
sports, which makes the players and particularly ownership that much
richer—like I said, a regressive tax—but yet one that goes into
the pockets of ownership, not like the lottery, where it goes to state
funding for schools or whatever. I mean, it’s like a privately run
lottery system, and I mean, frankly, betting is basically a lottery
system, as some of us have found out the hard way.

But the second part of that, too, is the connection with the teams
themselves, the foregoing of editorial independence, has created—I
mean, this is a crisis in sports journalism.

[Daily Northwestern: Former NU football player details hazing
allegations after coach suspension]

_DAILY NORTHWESTERN (7/8/23
[[link removed]])_

And the quote you read by an editor at the ATHLETIC named Stewart
Mandel, about people like myself, “stop bellyaching and crying about
the state of sports journalism”—he was using as an example the
very inspiring story of the Northwestern sports journalists at
Northwestern University.

They uncovered this terrible scandal
[[link removed]] involving
hazing and brutality on the football team. It caused the head coach,
who’d been there forever, to get fired. And so he’s saying,
“look, sports journalism’s alive and well; look at the
Northwestern paper.” But where are these people supposed to work?
And how are they supposed to do similar journalism, even if they are
lucky enough to get a job, if they work for somewhere like
the ATHLETIC that quashes their story?

And even if the ATHLETIC wouldn’t spike a story like this, let’s
be honest, anybody who’s worked in mainstream media will agree with
what I’m about to say: There is something called the “invisible
censor” in every mainstream newsroom, where sometimes you don’t
need an editor to spike a story, but you just know, whoa, if I run
afoul of the Northwestern football team, then that could somehow
affect my prospects, because of the ATHLETIC’s relationship with
that powerful institution.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, of course, we at FAIR, and on this show, talk
constantly about the conflicts between journalism as a public service
and media as a business. This is an attenuation of that, hyped-up
evidence of that.

But I always say, can we at least not fall for the same BS again and
again? “If you let us merge, we’ll do double the good reporting.
Bigness and market dominance is going to lead to quality.” You’ve
said it really already, but this is codswallop, this argument.

DZ: It is codswallop. That’s a word I’m going to use in the near
future. Thank you.

The part, though, that I want to accentuate before we finish up is
something that you just said that I think is so important, which is
this conflict between commerce and principled reporting exists in
every newsroom, you have to say, under the umbrella of the mainstream
media, of course.

And yet, at the very least, in the NEW YORK TIMES sports section
case, it was a _conflict_. This feels so much more like a surrender.

JJ: All right, I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking
with Dave Zirin, sports editor at THE NATION. You can find his piece,
“The End of the NEW YORK TIMES Sports Page Is a Tragedy,” online
at THENATION.COM
[[link removed]].
Dave Zirin, thank you so much for joining us today on COUNTERSPIN.

DZ: Thank you for having me. I really support and respect the work
that you do.

_DAVE ZIRIN is the sports editor of The Nation and the author
of The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World._

_Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of
FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes
frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR
Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview
Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News,
among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications
Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting. _

_FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering
well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We
work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater
diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that
marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. As an
anti-censorship organization, we expose neglected news stories and
defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive
group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to
break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent
public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of
information._

_FAIR’S WORK IS SUSTAINED BY OUR GENEROUS CONTRIBUTORS, WHO ALLOW US
TO REMAIN INDEPENDENT. DONATE
[[link removed]] TODAY TO BE A PART OF THIS
IMPORTANT MISSION._

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