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Sports

NBA Journalists Are Everything Mainstream Journalists Aren’t

Mainstream journalists covering Wall Street, or labor issues, or tax policy could learn a lot from how NBA reporters have stepped up and covered their beat with honesty, integrity, and an adversarial spirit that has long been missing in the news media.

David Aldridge interviewing Gregg Popovich. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In a recent conversation on Twitter about NBA free agency, Elias Isquith of Salon expressed amusement at the fact that mainstream NBA reporters turn into “total class-war hippies when it comes to sports league economics.” This has particularly been true since the NBA lockout of 2011, which ended with what can only be described as a resounding victory for owners, and it’s fascinating when considered in the context of broader political and economic journalism in the United States. In fact, journalists covering Wall Street, or labor issues, or tax policy could learn a lot from how NBA reporters have stepped up and covered their beat with honesty, integrity, and an adversarial spirit that has long been missing in the news media.

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The most high-profile basketball journalists, almost to a person, are firmly and openly pro-player. Andrew Sharp, of Grantlandwrote in SB Nation during the lockout that players were “getting screwed,” and that the owners were unreasonably intent on trying to “squeeze” the players despite having already won several significant concessions. Sharp derided the owners’ behavior as “disgusting,” accusing them of “greed,” “deception,” and a determination to “humiliate” the players.

David Aldridge, formerly of ESPN and now with NBA.com, recently wrote about the one-sided argument regarding free agency, which “always centers on how the player should sacrifice for the good of the team,” as opposed to expecting sacrifice on the part of the owners, many of whom are grotesquely rich. And business is booming in the NBA, as evidenced by the fact that the small-market, superstar-less Milwaukee Bucks recently sold for an astonishing $550 million. The league has to “beat away billionaires who want to buy NBA franchises with a stick,” Aldridge notes, so the current owners’ cries of poverty cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Bill Simmons of Grantland. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Grantland’s Zach Lowe recently spent an entire column deriding the double standard that demands perpetual sacrifice from players, while owners are “swimming in cash” and “laughing all the way to the bank.” Lowe writes—very matter-of-factly—that the “league’s primary goal” during the 2011 lockout period was to “transfer cash from players to owners.” Even Lowe’s boss Bill Simmons, the golden child of Bristol and someone who has always sedulously avoided politics, has unequivocally sided with players (and against owners) when the situation has called for it. In a 2012 piece on the Oklahoma City Thunder trading away James Harden for financial reasons, Simmons mocked the “Billionaire Dudes Who Hit The Jackpot With Durant, Hijacked The Sonics From Seattle And Have Been Raking In Money In OKC Ever Since” and illustrated the absurdity of the “small-market” excuse for cutting costs and trading away popular players. The disingenuous owners should “can it,” he wrote.

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It’s important to note that these opinions are being espoused squarely in the mainstream. ESPN, which owns Grantland, is a global behemoth, owned by Disney and worth more than $50 billion: hardly analagous to some radical political site. And as for the journalists themselves, these are not the Matt Taibbis of sports reporting. They’re not fiery polemicists who went into journalism so they could take aim at billionaire sports owners. These are mostly mainstream, outwardly apolitical journalists whose work is more straight reporting than any kind of explicit opinion writing. Except these journalists are actually willing to call out powerful people when they are being dishonest or when they’re acting like bullies, unlike virtually all of all their peers in the news media.

Contrast these NBA journalists’ caustic criticism of team owners with the often fawning coverage of someone like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in the media. Dimon is known as a "media darling" despite the fact that, under his leadership, JPMorgan Chase paid more than $20 billion in fines in 2013 (which, incidentally, did not prevent him from receiving a massive raise in 2014). Dimon has engaged in more shady and nefarious behavior than all current NBA owners combined (Sterling is gone, right?)—so why don’t we see more mainstream journalists write about him with similar sarcasm and contempt?

There is no single, obvious reason why these sports journalists are able to be so openly combative toward the plutocrats on their beat, while writers and reporters in the news media—whose responsibility to the public is far greater—engage in reliably sycophantic coverage of the wealthy classes. Indeed, explanations for the existence of such an obedient and dutiful Fourth Estate in the US have been offered for decades. Chomsky and Herman thought it was mostly economic: Mainstream media outlets must cater their coverage to investors, advertisers, and the business class in general, so therefore the coverage must be tailored accordingly. Chris Hayes recently advanced the concept of "cognitive capture": the idea that even those who are naturally opposed to the elite, corporate world will eventually, with enough time spent in this environment, end up submitting to its orthodoxies.

The key factor, however, in this disconnect between news reporting and sports reporting may just be the simple pull of careerism which doesn't apply to the same extent in sports as it does in news. Journalists covering politics and the economy for corporate outlets are most likely committing career suicide if they call important members of the ownership class "disgusting" or accuse them of trying to "humiliate" their employees. We all know how intertwined the elite classes are in this country, and if some billionaire or corporate entity is regularly being thrashed in a mainstream outlet, someone is surely getting a phone call with instructions to make it stop. At the very least, there will be a social cost, with major networking-related setbacks. Furthermore, those who write about the wealthy in such antagonistic terms are unlikely to be hired by corporate news outlets in the first place, so most of the journalists who believe strongly in "punching up" have already been weeded out. In sports journalism, though, class and labor issues are so marginal to what these people write about in a given year, that no one really notices. If one of the aforementioned journalists decided to turn attacking owners into a full-time gig, instead of something worth saying only during the occasional lockout or free agency drama, things might be different. But for now they can get away with it, and at the very least they deserve credit for respecting their readers enough to value truth over "balance."

There is no doubt that covering sports is a different animal from covering Wall Street. Obviously railing against NBA owners in a piece for Grantland requires less courage than, say, risking one’s career and connections at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times by exposing the limitless avarice of the super rich, or by explicitly siding with workers in any major labor disputes. But substance aside, just consider the language these NBA journalists employ—“greed, ” “deception,” “swimming in cash,” “laughing all the way to the bank”—it's pure class warfare. Mainstream journalists covering business or labor issues would never dream of speaking about the wealthy in such shrill terms. But with NBA free agency creating a bigger buzz than ever, many of these reporters could stand to learn a thing or two about what journalism is all about.

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