The Daily Beast set out this weekend to “expose” former New York Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera as a right-wing bigot and lunatic. As with most who go up against Mariano, the Daily Beast swings and misses.
“You’re special for me,” the former ballplayer, who spoke no English when he left his native Panama in 1990, told an audience of roughly 50,000 Sunday as he was inducted officially into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Thank you for your help. Latin American fans, thank you. Thank you for loving me. I’m so humbled and blessed to receive this incredible honor. God bless you all.”
That same day, the Daily Beast chose to publish a salacious hit piece originally titled, “Inside Baseball Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera’s Secret Far-Right Politics.” The subhead adds, “The Yankees legend — who will be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday — has managed to keep his political leanings hidden for decades.”
The article has been stealth-edited since its original publication to remove the word “secret” from the headline. The site’s editors also removed the article’s original artwork, which featured an image of Rivera standing on a mound fashioned to look like a yarmulke, centered in the middle of the Israeli flag.
The funniest thing about the article is the fact that there is nothing to back its most alarming claims, according to the story’s own reporting. The author, freelance journalist Robert Silverman, wrote originally that Rivera has “served at the pleasure of a racist president, taken part in thinly veiled propaganda on behalf of an apartheid government in Israel, and gotten chummy with outright bigots and apocalyptic loons.”
The article has been stealth edited to remove the word “apartheid” from its reference to the government of Israel. In its place now stands the term “far-right.” Silverman adds, “None of this will be inscribed on his Hall of Fame plaque. It should, even if much of the sports world would very much like to pretend none of it exists.”
That is quite the laundry list of charges. Let us take them one-by-one.
By “served at the pleasure of a racist president” Silverman means, “Rivera was nominated for the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. A month later, Rivera appeared at the White House for a friendly photo op, and in March, he was part of the delegation sent to the opening of the Special Olympics.”
The freelancer adds, “Rivera also took part in a 2017 briefing on the opioid crisis (during which he never uttered more than a sentence or two, save for a few chuckles when the president fondly recalled his cut fastball). He has been praised by the president whenever the opportunity arose, and Ivanka got in a shout-out as well. Finally, Rivera co-hosted a pricey fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle for the America First PAC last August, at a cost of $50,000 per couple.”
Next, by “taken part in thinly veiled propaganda on behalf of a far-right government in Israel,” Silverman means simply that Rivera is pro-Israel and that he engages in pro-Israel activism, including touring an Israeli military installation in 2018, which is in and of itself a terrible thing because Israel is an “apartheid” state (Silverman’s original words, not mine).
Lastly, when Silverman writes that Rivera has “gotten chummy with outright bigots and apocalyptic loons,” he means the former ballplayer, who is an outspoken evangelical Christian, once spoke at the same conference as pastor John Hagee, who Rivera claims motivated him to become more active in supporting Israel. Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser John Bolton spoke at the same event.
In other words, the story is a big nothing, wrapped in a thick sheet of innuendo and guilt-by-association.
If there is not a word yet to describe the phenomenon of a newsroom timing the release of a supposedly damaging report to coincide with a public figure’s proudest moment, there ought to be. Because that is a thing that we do now.
