Judy Battista, Albert Breer, Jeff Darlington and Michael Silver have about 50 years of collective experience covering the National Football League for publications including The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Miami Herald, Newsday, Sporting News, Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.
As of Monday afternoon, these were the most recent articles under their bylines: “Robert Griffin III’s injury has [Washington] facing uncertain future,” “Matt Ryan’s Atlanta Falcons driven to leave 2013 season behind,” “Branden Albert, Miami Dolphins’ new offensive line start strong,” and “Dez Bryant’s career journey continues to make for riveting ride.”
With all due respect to Dez Bryant’s ride, another NFL story drew slightly more attention last week. So why didn’t these four veteran football reporters and columnists write about the Ray Rice domestic violence case and the public and media condemnation of its handling by the NFL? Perhaps because they work for the NFL.
To be fair, the NFL.com writers did appear frequently on the NFL-owned NFL Network to discuss the Rice case. In one report, Battista noted that the NFL faced “one of its greatest crises” but also asserted, debatably, that it had “done everything it could ... to put Ray Rice, his crime and his punishment behind it.” On one show, Silver commented, “I believe this has made the league look poor the last few days.”
It’s easy to cherry-pick comments — Silver was more circumspect on another program I watched, and studio host Rich Eisen earned praise for his bluntness and skepticism during a pregame telecast. But it’s no surprise that NFL-owned media would tiptoe around stories questioning the integrity and credibility of the NFL.
The Rice case is a reminder of how the nearly $10 billion-a-year NFL’s rise to cultural prominence has allowed it to shape the message transmitted to fans, both through its quasijournalistic arms and through multibillion-dollar deals with other media. It’s also fair to say, though, that the Rice video has changed how Roger Goodell’s NFL will be covered going forward. The league’s media lapdogs have started barking, and they might not stop until the commissioner is gone.
The NFL and its 32 teams have the money and power to buy up and control media, and they’ve done it, to lucrative ends. As recently as 2007, the NFL outsourced its website to the former CBS SportsLine. Now the league hires seasoned journalists like Battista away from The New York Times. Locally, no franchise has been more aggressive about controlling and co-opting the media than the one in Washington, whose owner, Daniel Snyder, has bought radio stations, partnered with TV stations, acquired websites and, most recently, become a “content and marketing partner” of the Washington Times newspaper.
Those moves reflect direct economic muscle. They’re also a consequence of the NFL’s transformation into a 24/7/365, no-detail-too-small business, the result of some combination of league marketing, the rise of fantasy sports and social media, and the public’s eagerness to consume anything that has to do with a guy wearing a helmet.
Today’s most celebrated NFL reporters deliver 140-character scooplets about who’s injured, who got cut or who signed a contract. ESPN’s Adam Schefter has more than 3 million Twitter followers. His ESPN colleagues Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, the investigative reporters who wrote League of Denial and a companion documentary about the NFL’s brain-injury crisis, have just more than 10,000 combined.
What Schefter and the Fainaru brothers do requires savvy and skill: cultivating sources, unearthing information, delivering it to the public in an appealing way. But while the Fainaru brothers’ work has exposed the ugly reality of life inside the NFL — making a case that football maybe shouldn’t be played at all — Schefter’s is the coal that keeps the NFL engines burning. In the midst of the Rice news last week, Schefter tweeted out bits of ephemera like, “No practice today for Packers RB Eddie Lacy, who is recovering from a concussion.”
In his book The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, Dean Starkman describes two conflicting strains of American journalism: access reporting and accountability reporting. The former involves getting inside information from powerful institutions, the latter telling inside stories about them.
“Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views,” Starkman writes.
Like Wall Street and other big institutions, the NFL prefers and — in the case of reporters like Schefter, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen and Sports Illustrated’s Peter King — facilitates access reporting. It’s good business. The steady flow of information on the ESPN ticker keeps NFL fans engaged with the product and wanting more of it.
As far as accountability journalism is concerned, it seems like no coincidence that the Rice story broke thanks to the gate-crashers at TMZ — a bunch of outsiders who have much to gain from knocking pro football down a peg and are willing to write checks to buy up the sort of photos and videos that tarnish the NFL’s vaunted shield.
Meanwhile, it looks like some NFL beat reporters were used and abused by the hands that typically feed them news about free-agent signings and coaches on the hot seat.
The problem with access journalism comes when reporters serve as mere pass-throughs for information, especially when that information is a lot weightier than the Chargers planning to sign Doug Legursky.
In July, King reported that “the NFL and some Ravens officials have seen” the video of Rice punching out his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, inside a New Jersey casino hotel elevator. But then the NFL denied having seen the video, and King explained that he hadn’t done due diligence, posting a statement saying his source had told him that he had only “assumed” the NFL had seen the video.
NFL beat reporters, as a rule, didn’t get into the business to write about domestic violence or brain injury. Given a general lack of expertise in football matters outside football and the need to feed the information beast, NFL mainstays like King — who also flubbed the reporting about Michael Sam’s coming out — might not approach reporting with the same critical distance as someone like Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer Jesse Eisinger, who said recently that he always reminds himself why sources share information. “It’s not because I’m good-looking or a nice person. They’re all talking to push an agenda,” he told The New York Times.
Even Goodell’s closest media friends must now realize that the league office is pushing an agenda, and pushing it hard. When the commissioner denied that the league office had seen the Rice elevator video before last week, the reporters weren’t pleased.
“Those reporters, who regularly and uncritically pass along the league’s party line but are rarely exposed like this, are the ones who look foolish now,” Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky wrote.
This, ultimately, could be Goodell’s undoing. Since he was named NFL commissioner in 2006, Goodell, 55, who has been paid $74 million over the last two years, has received fawning press coverage, including a 6,000-word King puff piece in the pages of SI and a laughable Time cover story asking, “Can Roger Goodell Save Football?” Now the writers who once bowed before the commissioner’s throne are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
Well, maybe.
Stefan Fatsis, the author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic, writes for Slate Magazine. He can be reached at sfatsis9@gmail.com.
