I was the program director of a journalism training center in Washington, D.C., a city with six professional teams and zero sports reporting gigs.
That latter part is only a slight exaggeration.
You’d think the home of the Capitals, Nationals, Commanders, Wizards, Mystics, and D.C. United would have plentiful opportunities for aspiring sports journalists to learn the craft. But you’d be wrong. Demand for jobs in sports journalism far outstrips the supply.
Things have only gotten worse since my time as an instructor. Even the Washington Post cut its sports section, reflecting a trend that goes well beyond the D.C. region.
As a niche discipline, sports reporting seems headed for extinction, which raises the obvious question: What happened? How did this beat go from being a staple of U.S. newsrooms to going the way of the dodo?
There are several reasons, but let’s focus on one of the most obvious: just as the roles of librarian and barista have become the exclusive domains of the chronically resentful, the septum-pierced, and the type of person to self-diagnose as having “long COVID,” so too has the field of sports journalism been taken over by incredibly annoying and deeply unlikable people — those who’ve adopted politics as a personality.
Take, for instance, the badgering from sports reporters that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman faced a few days ago over the U.S. men’s hockey team’s Feb. 22 Olympic victory in Milan — a historic win that sportswriters view as a bleak, joyless referendum on President Donald Trump.
“I’m not going to weigh in on the political front,” the commissioner said, declining to take the bait. “I think what was portrayed was unfortunate, not accurate, and I know for a fact that the men’s team had no intention of doing anything to slight the women’s team.”
The U.S. women’s team beat Canada 2-1 in overtime. The U.S. men’s team also beat Canada 2-1 in overtime.
It was glorious.
Then came Trump’s congratulatory phone call to the men’s hockey team. The players laughed and bantered in their locker room as the president spoke via a cellphone held by FBI Director Kash Patel, who was also at the Olympic event for some reason. Trump invited the men’s team to his State of the Union address and then joked that he would have to invite the also-victorious women’s team or else he’d be impeached.
Some of the hockey players laughed. Some cheered the women’s team. Some attended the State of the Union address (the women’s team was also invited but declined due to a scheduling conflict).
The sports press are not pleased.
The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team “lost the room,” declared the Athletic.
How so, you ask? First, they failed to check the commander in chief in his tracks, missing the chance to call out misogyny everywhere. Second, some of the players actually attended the State of the Union! For Athletic senior columnist Jerry Brewer, this is unacceptable because this “isn’t a neutral climate.”
USA Today’s sports vertical, For the Win, published an opinion article claiming the men’s team had “utterly failed to meet the cultural moment.” A Slate sports writer shamed the team for not anticipating the negative backlash that a Slate sports writer might have to the team taking a call from “a massively unpopular president who’s in the news every day for his intimate friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile.”
The only thing more annoying than writers presenting their neuroses as if everyone agrees (we do not) is when they pretend to be mere witnesses to the backlash rather than the backlash itself.
Elsewhere, Hockey News editor Ian Kennedy warned that the window for the team to “apologize for laughing” was closing soon.
All this over a joke.
Meanwhile, the women’s hockey team spent the week after their win fielding nearly nonstop questions about the men’s team, its behavior, and how they feel about the president. The one thing the women weren’t really asked about was their gold medal overtime victory.
Alison Bechdel wept.
Last week, nine days after the so-called “controversial locker room phone call,” the league commissioner fielded continued questions about the incident.
“If anything, both teams were chanting, ‘two-for-two,’” Bettman said. “How what happened, and how it was portrayed, I wish didn’t happen the way it did, and I think it was unfair to the men’s team. And I don’t think the women’s team had a different view of it.… These two teams respected each other.”
In response to his comments, the CBC reported that the commissioner had “declined an opportunity” to “weigh in on the political aspect” of members of the U.S men’s team “laughing at a comment many viewed as sexist.”
It’s all so tiresome.
It’s also entirely predictable for this dying breed of news reporting. They’ll focus on anything that allows them to talk about anything but sports.
Remember how sports journalists tried to provoke professional tennis players into staking out explicitly political positions? Remember how they helped spearhead the effort to get MLB to pull the All-Star Game from Georgia in 2021 over partisan propaganda claiming the state’s new voter ID laws would disenfranchise minority voters (the state would go on to experience record voter turnout in the next presidential election)? Remember how sports journalists criticized audiences for not fully supporting the national anthem protests?
Perhaps you remember reading that WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark is a ratings draw only because she’s straight and white, not because she’s an elite sniper.
Still wondering why sports reporting as a discipline is vanishing?
When they’re not busy attacking exceptionalism or arguing that what you love is actually terrible, they’re busy forcing the unlikeable (Megan Rapinoe), unremarkable (Colin Kaepernick), and unrepentantly mercenary (Chinese Communist propaganda tool Eileen Gu) onto an unsuspecting public, all in an effort to make you believe that those who seem to resent this country are good, actually.
Just ignore these “heroes’” motivations and records (or lack thereof); the piety is what matters.
Except that audiences have fled for greener pastures.
Why turn to the sports section to read about intersectionality or yet another critique of federal policy when you can instead hear about your favorite team from alternative media sources — YouTubers, podcasters, and cable news hosts — who at least appear to enjoy the subject matter?
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It’s a no-brainer
Soon, those who love the game will be the only ones left on the field.
T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, D.C.
