Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren reportedly said in 1968 that “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.” This reflects a classic American disconnect between journalists and ordinary people. The former seek out tragedy and error, and the latter love heroism and accomplishment. But at the New York Times, a paper that has over the past few years become even more removed from normal people than readers in 1968 could possibly have imagined, the problem is so bad that even the sports section has become another compendium of humanity’s failures, another depressing and didactic project by journalists who are obsessed with their own morality.
Do the sports writers at the New York Times like sports? Perhaps more relevant to their professional well-being: Do they even want to cover sports? These were the questions that came to mind after reading a Washington Post story earlier this month about the New York Times’s purchase of the Athletic, an online sporting news startup that covers a lot more sports than the New York Times does these days and that is in direct competition with the New York Times’s own sports desk.
According to the Post, the New York Times is now “focused less on more traditional sports coverage and more on, as one person in the newsroom put it, ‘ethereal stuff.’” Whatever that means. The only ethereal stuff I’ve ever seen in sports was Pedro Martinez in 2000.
While the Athletic is covering hundreds of sports teams across the country and around the world, the supposedly “New York” Times “doesn’t have anyone traveling or attending games full time for the Mets, Yankees, Knicks, Jets or Giants, though it does offer wall-to-wall coverage of tennis, the Olympics and the playoffs of major American sports.” Phew — I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find more in-depth coverage of Naomi Osaka refusing to play at Wimbledon.
Almost every detail of the Post’s article reads like Revenge of the Jocks, with a side of whining from the New York Times nerds: “Times sportswriters had worried to higher-ups that Athletic reporters, potential competitors, had been introducing themselves as Times journalists.” The horror. “One Athletic staffer, who had snapped a photo in front of the Times building in Manhattan and called it his new office, was asked to take it down.”
This is, first of all, very funny. Not since the New York Times fired its top pandemic reporter Donald McNeil Jr. for questioning the efficacy of Peruvian shamans have I had this much fun at the New York Times’s expense.
Critics need not accuse the New York Times of sanctimony; they confess it. Ben Smith in Semafor this week, writing about “the identity crisis at the New York Times,“ quoted a former executive as saying that it was “a business wrapped around a church.” The problem is that the New York Times has, and has always had, an insanely inflated sense of self. This goes way back. Gay Talese wrote in 1969 that Adolph Ochs, the great-great-grandfather of the New York Times’s current publisher, had hoped his heirs “would run the Times not merely for profit but somewhat along the business lines of a great church, gilding the wealth with virtue.”
To extend the metaphor that apparently drives the New York Times’s self-conception a bit further, if you want to have a gilded church, it helps to be Catholic, or perhaps Anglican, not a roundheaded Puritan stamping out vice. Yet what has driven the valuation of sites such as the Athletic and Barstool Sports is sports betting, a concern the Post raises in explaining how they have gotten to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It is that money that allows them to actually granularly cover sports (which is, it turns out, what readers looking for sports coverage are actually looking for) instead of writing feature thinkpieces about the problematic nature of sports.
Asked whether the New York Times would allow a reporter to be paid by a gambling company, the Athletic’s publisher told the Post: “We allow gambling companies to advertise on the website. As long as someone isn’t putting themselves in danger of violating journalism and independence ethics, we would be supportive of that situation.”
But the Athletic does quite a bit more than allow gambling companies to advertise. In 2021, it signed a partnership with BetMGM that included the creation of “The Athletic Betting Hub, a new content vertical for The Athletic.” Each sports league on the Athletic’s homepage includes a “picks” and “odds” subvertical with a “powered by BetMGM” logo and a “place a bet” link to BetMGM’s website. Now that stories from the Athletic are on the New York Times website, you can get from the front page of the New York Times to a sports betting site in three clicks. If you want to make tech money by writing about sports, this seems to be how you do it, as the Athletic’s $550 million payout from the New York Times makes clear. What’s less clear is whether this actually ends up making the New York Times money. The Athletic is now losing more than $10 million a quarter.
I find the deluge of betting ads in the past few years, accompanied almost instantly by public service announcements on gambling addiction, to be alarming. But hate the sin, not the sinner. My moral concern, anyway, is for American society, not the journalistic ethics of New York Times reporters and their not-quite-colleagues at the Athletic. (I would call them “comrades,” but one of the reasons the New York Times might have preferred to buy the Athletic rather than expand in-house is that the Athletic isn’t unionized.)
For what it’s worth, I wish the Athletic well, not least because its coverage has been objectively better at actually relating stories about sports than many other newspapers. Anyway, considering that the Athletic’s strategy was to use its venture money to bleed local papers dry until it was the only one left standing, there may soon not be any other news outlet left to read about my beloved Red Sox. And God knows I’m not going to subscribe to the Boston Globe. It’s worse than the New York Times.
Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for The Algemeiner.
