But enough about Phil Mushnick, how do you think Fox Sports’ Jason Whitlock feels? Sen. John Kerry invited some of journalism’s leading lights to Washington to testify about the sorry state of their profession last week, and Big Sexy declares “I wish that I had the necessary profile to be called before Congress to share my opinion.” You might want to write this date down somewhere Ladies and Gentleman, as that might be the closest we get to seeing Whitlock express anything approaching humility.
Some of my critics are troubled by my focus on ESPN. They wrongly believe I’m hostile toward ESPN because I split with/was fired by the network. I chose to liberate my mouth from ESPN because the network’s business relationships with all of the major sports leagues stand in the way of free, creative speech. I’m occasionally hostile toward ESPN because it’s an arrogant, reckless, destructive monopoly, and I still enjoy being a journalist from time to time. American journalists, last I checked, should be occasionally offended by arrogant, reckless, destructive monopolies. They’re generally seen as threats to democracy and our way of life.
Despite its obvious power, the mainstream media virtually ignores ESPN. We leave the coverage of the most powerful institution in sports to basement bloggers and a handful of harmless, press-release-rewriting embedded sports writers.
Our neglect reminds me of the newspaper arrogance that allowed “kids” to cover high school football and basketball recruiting. We ignored the clear public demand for recruiting news and let a group of sports fans create Rivals.com, which sold for $100 million.
Now we have Deadspin, The Big Lead and an army of citizen journalists building followings and eroding our credibility by attempting to police the people who conceitedly refuse to police themselves.
For the most part, bloggers can’t do it. They just don’t know enough. Their instincts are horrible. They’d never think to wonder whether a writer would leak a coaches name as a job candidate as a favor for information down the line so the coach could leverage his current school into a fat raise. And if a blogger did think of it, he/she would be unlikely to have the wherewithal to do the necessary reporting.
Having appeared on Oprah and “Mike & Mike”, I see no reason why Whitlock couldn’t school Congress on this issue (after all, I’ve already declared him to be “such a big deal that when he masturbates, it’s black on black crime”). But during the same week Jason chose to compare the NY TImes-trained Selena Roberts to the Rev. Al Sharpton it’s rather curious he’d cite blogs as lacking the “wherewithal” to do any investigative reporting. Is repeatedly decrying ESPN’s pervasive influence really a matter of compiling facts, or isn’t really a matter of Whitlock’s opinion — one that not-so-ironically is echoed throughout the sports blogosphere. Is there really a world of difference between Big Sexy and a self-obsessed blogger? Other than most examples of the latter having more readers, that is.
First, what’s always been telling to me is the sandbagging Selena Roberts got when she broke the A-Roid story that he used PEDs at all – even tho she was right. A-Rod is a fraud, it’s widely thought, but you’re not allowed to prove it.
Her Duke columns on the “code of silence” in sports is proven by her critics every day. A number of google searches on blogs showed compounding “evidence” that Roberts is not credible on Duke because of her “code of silence” column. Here it is, judge for yourself:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/sports/31roberts.html?_r=1
The credibility point comes into play when she points out that three Duke team captains spoke to police and yet the police still could not ascertain what happened that night – leading her to believe it was yet again an example of the code of silence among college athletes. Defenders say that the fact that the captains spoke to the police proves there’s no code of silence. Still, whatever the captains said, their “eye witness” accounts did not give the cops much. This is a point defended by the TIMES’ public editor:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502E3D9153FF930A15757C0A9609C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
Take that internal defense for what you will, but it did take a long time to get a picture of that whole night — a lot of which reveals them as a gang of dudes with real racial and sexist issues, if not rapists.
What’s Roberts main credibility issue? So far, it’s from a lengthy Jim Rome interview where she is accused of not getting all the Duke facts right three years after her stories appeared. Look, I’m as critical as anyone about this stuff, but she has nothing to apologize for in the original columns and probably should have reread them before going on the air to talk about them. Whitlock points to this Duke blog, apparently devoted to the defense of the Fatty Arbuckles of Lacrosse, that takes her Rome interview apart:
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/
Great, except her journalism stands. Her Duke columns are archly-critical of college sports and the treatment of women by college athletes — a subject covered here, too. She’s clearly using the Duke incident to get at a bigger story. She fills her columns with lots of examples of that behavior, both backing up her claim, but also poisoning the atmosphere around the Duke team as their lives as free citizens are at stake. Roberts critics have a long way to go before showing the Duke columns as lacking credibility. It’s definitely advocate journalism against sexism and racism and the bully culture of college sports.
And last, after detailing the “code of silence” world that she did so well in her columns (even her critics would have to agree she proved that point) her anonymous sources usage in the A-Rod makes more sense. Even if it won’t lend more credibility to her book, it doesn’t take away.
The vilification of “rats” — Canseco, John Dean, Elia Kazan, Richard C. Clarke — is common, even when they’re right. So is the veneration of creeps who refuse to talk: Oliver North or G. Gordon Liddy, or current players, owners, and managers who were shocked to learn there were steroids in baseball. TV personalities like Larry King and Peter Gammons get big name interviews because they respect the code of silence. Investigative reporters like Roberts, or Sy Hersh, or Woodward, have to dig and dig and corner the big names into talking, which they usually do to save face, money, or careers.
Sorry to her that Whitlock remains unconvinced, but as Barry Bonds current agent for the KC Royals, his critiques of advocate journalism don’t carry much weight.
Ben