“Today, sports writing is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code.” -- Bryan Curtis, The Ringer
That’s the first honest thing a liberal sports writer has said this year.
The writer busting on Curtis and his fellowship of left-wing media comrades is Michael Brendan Dougherty, a self-described “conservative” writing for The Week. Dougherty says we can see the growing liberalism of sportswriters in their policing of left-wing positions – from their opposition to the Redskins nickname to President Trump’s attempt to reign in illegal immigration. He calls out the ‘sloppiness and arrogance in their thinking’ and the disdain they exhibit for their audience. These progressives on the sports desk may have also punished pitching great Curt Schilling, a Republican, by denying him votes for the baseball Hall of Fame.
Dougherty cites Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra for his defense of the left-wing sports page. Calcaterra confirms the agenda-driven sports media are not speaking for the common fan. That’s the second honest thing a sports lefty has written this year.
Following up on that admission, Dougherty says they are actually speaking at the common fan. Then he adds: “The increasing ideological uniformity of sports writing is bad for sports journalism and for sports themselves.” It encourages conformism and intellectual laziness.
We shouldn’t be surprised. For as Dougherty says, “The liberalism on offer on sports pages is rather infatuated with the norms and aspirations of the class of people from which journalists are drawn. And this narrowness usually puts them in an antagonistic position not just with fans, but with the entire sports culture beyond journalism.”
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Dougherty doesn’t address where these quasi-journalists are drawn from. But it’s well known that a disproportionate share in broadcast sports hail from the cradle of sportscasters: Syracuse University. A great many others, in print, broadcast and the Internet, come streaming out of Secular Humanist State U., where students are taught not to think for themselves, but to follow liberal lemmings. That’s how they get good grades from Professor Socialist. Batting left assures them the opportunities to slant news and columns for the school newspaper or radio station. Leading to employment at left-leaning media.
These folks write for each other, Dougherty claims. Of course. They want to be part of the Conformity Club. When it comes to politics and social issues, there’s no real diversity on the ESPN yakfests, only shared assumptions that conservative policy positions are “bigotry.”
Sports media aren’t just following each other’s leads, Dougherty writes. He says “sports writers seem to be appealing to the general manager or team HR departments to enforce liberal norms on their highly paid assets.” This makes sense in the filter of sports teams’ and leagues’ attacks on religious freedom laws and the admiration for Jason Collins and Michael Sam, or disdain for Moscow’s “homophobic Olympics.” When sports commissioners and team general managers gush over left-wing actions, the media lefties fall into the fawning line of sheeple in agreement. The number of reporters disagreeing with the majority is statistically irrelevant.
Dougherty notes that feature stories often focus on leftist athletes as well – the “socially conscious” Eagles’ linebacker Connor Barwin. Or athletes like Yasiel Puig are profiled in a superficial way “in which their background is mined for all political resonance and dramatic tension, but the actual personality is carefully obscured.”
Although Dougherty is more accepting of liberal bias in sports than I am – he claims these media people “do a lot of good” – he concludes they’re not helping themselves. They openly disdain the people they cover and it may foster a “charmless contempt for a huge portion of their readers that they can't hide and we can't unsee.”
We are getting more and more practice at not being able to unsee all this left-wing activism masquerading as “sports journalism.” Way too much so.
