I don’t read enough sports journalism to have an informed opinion about it. My interest in the more fine-grained, behind the scenes aspects of sports waned around the time this country geared up to invade Iraq and I suddenly had higher priorities. I still watch sports, although with less interest and intensity, but I hardly ever read about them. Still, I can discern a few things even from my remove.
One is that the leagues have become more international and diverse than ever. This is happening to the country at large, as well, but not at the same pace. As a result, the culture of your average NBA or NFL or baseball locker room is much more like the culture of Miami than it is like the culture of Dayton, Ohio.
If you want to cover these teams and these players, you need to understand and respect their values, which are both multicultural and millennial. And if they’re out of step with tradition or with their largely white non urban fan bases, that isn’t a knock on the players because they didn’t create this cultural gulf.
Now, Michael Brendan Dougherty may be a conservative sports writer, and that might make him more attuned to the worldview of the average fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder, but it doesn’t make him more attuned to the people who are out on the floor dribbling the ball.
His critiques of liberal sports writers probably have a lot of validity. I think the liberal writers are probably alienated from the players they’re covering, too. But the most recent debate in sports that caught my attention was over how fans of the St. Louis Cardinals treated their new free agent signee from the World Series champion Chicago Cubs. Dexter Fowler voiced opposition to President Trump’s travel ban because it impacted his family personally. His wife has family in Iran. His reward for speaking up was to be told to “shut up and play.”
Other athletes from the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots have been similarly criticized for refusing to travel to the White House because they are opposed to Trump’s politics, particularly the travel ban.
This conservative backlash can be seen regularly when Hollywood stars like, more recently, Meryl Streep, speak out against Republican policies.
As a journalist, you can stick to reviewing movies and games, or you can bring the actors and athletes to life a little bit by trying to understand them and what drives their success and their decisions. If you’re covering a more conservative culture, like auto racing, then the same holds true. It’s not necessary or helpful to be judgmental about the people you’re covering, and you should at least strive to portray them accurately and with respect, if possible.
Where I think the problem arises is that although there is a growing cultural chasm between the culture of the locker rooms and the culture of the fans, it’s the fans who are the primary consumer of sports journalism. And they are feeling like their values aren’t respected. They know that the players don’t agree with them about #BlackLivesMatter or Trump or discriminating against gays. They don’t want this pointed out to them by the players or the journalists who cover the players. And if the journalists take the players’ side, then the journalists are out of touch and elitist and arrogant.
It’s a mistake to blame the journalists for this. It’s just a symptom of something that is plaguing our entire society right now.
Similar remarks re movies. “Give us the beloved stuff we want — that only you can provide — and never mind the lecture.”
I’ve discussed this with a conservative friend, who’s very smart but adopts the standard right-wing line (which is fiendishly clever) about how the “diversity message” (or whatever) is intrusive or proscriptive. “Keep the politics out of it.” Which is silly because, even more than sports, movies are intrinsically political and always have been.
I’m not going to name specific movies because I figure BooMan doesn’t want this thread to derail into a huge discussion of this movie or that movie…but I will point out that the left-wing movies from (say) the 1970s, about labor unions or corporate malfeasance, were very successful; the contemporary movies that attempt to advance concepts in identity politics are always divisive (That Times piece last week in which the “beleagured” Trump supporter railed against Meryl Streep is typical of this)…but the “under the radar” movies that address economic or moral themes from a left-wing perspective tend to do well and serve a social function.
Again, BooMan is trying to talk about sports and I want to draw the comparison without de-railing his discussion, so we probably shouldn’t go off onto an endless digression about Hollywood.
No, I lumped movies and sports together for a reason.
They’re liberal cultures enjoyed by conservative culture.
We don’t have anything like it on the left where a bunch of really conservative creative people make something we love even as we can’t stand their politics. Instead, we have isolated cases, like Jon Voight, who is about as great of an actor as you will find.
Or Clint Eastwood. An amazing director who is quite the idiot when it comes to politics.
I don’t care about offscreen personae and opinions. (“Intentional Fallacy” and all that.) I care about the politics of what’s onscreen — and Eastwood has made movies with powerful liberal messages (Changeling, Mystic River, Letters From Iwo Jima.)
Agreed, which is why his politics baffle me.
He’s just confused.
I believe conservatives are all intrinsically confused, by definition: I don’t regard conservatism as a legitimate position — as an “alternate but equally viable” point of view. I used to, but not any more. After enough time looking at their economics, their social ideas, their policies..I can’t regard it as a serious political philosophy. There’s too much magical thinking; too much dishonesty about goals and methods. Even if they “admit” their goals are white power and moving wealth upwards, it still doesn’t work; it doesn’t translate into a “rising tide lifts all boats” phenomenon the way they say.
So, Clint Eastwood is a classic “conservative” in that he thinks he’s a conservative (Obama is bad, “political correctness” is bad, etc.) but when he actually reacts to the world around him as an artist, what comes out is much more measured and progressive.
Someone like Evelyn Waugh (or, Tom Wolfe) is totally different — those are people who blatantly want the world to go back to the way it was before modernism and equality hit.
I’m not sure I agree with that. For example, I really like Dirty Harry — cinematically, it’s an absolutely fantastic movie, and very enjoyable — but it takes place in a conservative fantasyland created for the purpose of justifying the protagonist’s monstrous actions (meaning, Calahan is “the only solution” in a situation where the police and judges “have their hands tied” in a way that is the opposite of reality; it’s an expression of late-sixties “Silent Majority” paranoia). Back to the Future is a right-wing movie, through and through, but it’s still fanastic (and a lot of the Reagan-era nostalgia and materialism is deliberately counterbalanced in the sequels, made five years later).
My conservative friend points to Brokeback Mountain as the quintesential “liberal movie,” — whereas I use examples like Fight Club (which is extremely polemical in the best sense), Office Space (which is practically a Marxist tract about Worker Alienation) and The Fugitive (which successfully uses a conglomerated pharmaceutical corporation as the villain). All three of these were enjoyed by audiences who maybe didn’t see the liberal agendae because they weren’t telegraphed as such (or because the pastors etc. who train them to look for “liberalism” don’t have the wit or sophistication to see those movies as the liberal tracts they are.)
Eastwood just acted in Dirty Harry – Don Siegel directed. Eastwood is a much better director than actor.
Great references to Fight Club, Office Space, and The Fugitive.
Apologies for being unclear. I’m not talking about Eastwood — it could have been any actor. I’m saying the movie intrinsically, from the script on forward, is a right-wing, almost Fascist movie. (Many said this at the time.)
I’m not saying all movies or screenwriters are left-wing. I am saying that Hollywood, as a whole, is a liberal culture, just like the locker rooms of sports teams are liberal in most ways, especially when it comes to tolerance and multiculturalism. Obviously, they’re macho and male-dominated, too, so they’re not down the line cutting edge leftists. They’re also more religious and Southern in culture than the progressive movement. So, there are degrees here.
Still, the average 305 lb. white 19 year old from rural Georgia isn’t as culturally enlightened as the same guy who just spent four years in the Alabama football locker room and has now been drafted by the Falcons. While he still is likely to retain much of the culture he grew up with, he’s unlikely to share the racial assumptions of his high school friends.
Sports has become a progressive culture, just like moving to our cities has a way of quickly changing people’s assumptions.
Dougherty’s column is a damn mess. It draws a number of issues into the liberal/conservative fight which really don’t belong there.
The claim which is particularly problematic is the section which claimed liberals support freeing athletes from PED testing and discipline. “This is a strangely anti-labor and anti-regulation stance for liberals,” Dougherty wrote.
Horse hockey.
Players’ unions have demanded presumption of innocence, due process, fair treatment and quality testing programs. Over the years, they’ve bargained these things into their contracts thru collective bargaining. Dougherty falsely infers that Labor unions remain steadfastly opposed to keeping PED’s out of athletics.
The weakness of Dougherty’s claims against sportswriters in this area is illustrated by the column he links to in the middle of this section: a 2012 column by a sportswriter we’ve never heard of. He doesn’t have the goods yet tries to bluff his way through. This is repeated in many sections of his writing here.
Or Steven Mnuchin.
I think there are actually lots of companies that liberals enjoy and use even though they harm labor standards or the environment – Uber, Amazon and Apple come immediately to mind.
Which doesn’t change the fact that the public’s basic anti-authoritarian tendencies — the healthy, natural caution against getting manipulated, exploited and screwed — have been deliberately deflected away from corporate targets and onto “government” and “liberals distributing ‘free stuff’,” and this is a trend that has to be consciously and forcefully reversed.
Agreed. I have no idea why people tolerate Comcast or BCBS while complaining about the DMV. Well, I get it, but it never seems rational.
His critiques of liberal sports writers probably have a lot of validity. I think the liberal writers are probably alienated from the players they’re covering, too.
I’d venture to guess that a majority of sports writers aren’t liberal, just like an even bigger majority of sports radio shows aren’t liberal. Unless you define liberal as McCaskill/Manchin. Even then I’d be a bit skeptical.
A few sportswriters have surpassed their genus and become higher visibility. Maybe because they are wannabe Hunter Thompsons, stylistically?
Which ones are those? Mitch Albom? Skip Bayless?
I listen to sports radio in Chicago and they do talk politics too and they’re far more liberal than I would have assumed before I started listening consistently.
Cardinals fans are the worst.
Well, I’m embarrassed to admit that I kind of took a shine to Rocket McFadden:
“Jesus fucking christ. I am running out of homosexual euphemisms. They fucking deserve your usual shitty article today so I’m gonna just take solace in the fact the Rams sucked my cock last night. I’m tired. Until the next loss my little Arabian Buttplug.
-Rocket”
Fowler called the ban “unfortunate”, such horrible language. He and his Persian (Iranian) wife were planning on taking their daughter to grandma, now they are holding off. Commenters are so ugly. You ignorant fool, don’t you know you will be kidnapped and your wife raped if you go to that hellhole – and much worse garbage. Great way to welcome your new star right fielder, Cardinal Nation.
“This conservative backlash can be seen regularly when Hollywood stars like, more recently, Meryl Streep, speak out against Republican policies.”
You’d think this sort of criticism would fade out, considering who they boted into office. But of course not.
It’s a mistake to blame the journalists for this. It’s just a symptom of something that is plaguing our entire society right now.
Exactly right.
Look, we are all participating in a grand experiment never tried before. It may end up making millions of species extinct, including our own, but what the hell.
The experiment was imagined in the early 1980s. Conservatives were ascendant. They’d captured the Presidency and a narrow margin in the Senate, although in the Senate a lot of the Republicans were still lefties and some of the Dems were still on the right, but that wouldn’t last long. However, the major news media were still critical of their policies. So Heritage Foundation (which basically ran the Reagan presidency for the first 6 years) and its allies hatched an idea to have their billionaire sponsors buy up the news media to “become Dan Rather’s boss” (look up the quote).
In 1986 and 1987 the experiment started. The restrictions on media ownership were loosened and the fairness doctrine killed. Within years AM talk radio was the home of mostly extreme right wing diatribes – exclusively so in rural America. By 1992 all major networks were owned by people who wanted to advance the GOP cause, and they had started the process of replacing the key media faces and the editors and managers with those sympathetic to the cause. It took a while – Dan Rather was the last holdout to be kicked out in 2004. But it happened. The NYT was an early convert, leading the anti-Clinton hysteria while pretending to be liberal. NBC came along for the ride – google Jake Welch and Tim Russert to find out how pro-GOP media types were promoted. Or ABC and Brit Hume, before Fox.
But while the MSM morphed into a media group that pretended to be objective while always giving the GOP frame to every question, a right wing wurlitzer of a propoganda organization was forming. Starting with AM radio, then the internet, then Fox News to lead them all. By 2001 more than a quarter of Americans got all of the news they trusted from these sources.
So, 30 years of propaganda. 20 years of mainstream propaganda. All of it based on tribalism and hatred. 25% of the population that buys into it unconditionally. Another 25% that is sympathetic to it.
The US has become two groups. Those with empathy for people completely unlike them and those who would (reluctantly in some cases, eagerly in others) support death camps for people of other races and their sympathizers if the right justification were presented. And the US media is adamant that they must present the two sides – one pro-genocide, the other anti-, as being just the same in terms of norms and civility.
What an awful experiment. But it explains why if a person makes a statement identifying them as part of the empathy group that person will be immediately condemned by those who are in the pro-genocide group.
The US has become two groups. Those with empathy for people completely unlike them and those who would (reluctantly in some cases, eagerly in others) support death camps for people of other races and their sympathizers
if the right justification were presented.FTFY
“So Heritage Foundation (which basically ran the Reagan presidency for the first 6 years) and its allies hatched an idea to have their billionaire sponsors buy up the news media to “become Dan Rather’s boss” (look up the quote).”
Actually – it started earlier than this – the Powell memo in 1973. Where do you think the Heritage Foundation and its ilk came from in the first place? Rick Perlstein’s books, as well as Jane Meyer’s Dark Money are very instructive and informative on the entire topic. The “left” has attempted to counter this with Center for American Progress, for example, but are outspent and out-maneuvered at every juncture. The fact that the right has convinced 75% of the population that the MSM is “liberal” including, apparently, even the most milquetoast sports writer, makes things even worse as there really is very little outright progressive thought that is actually disbursed by “main stream” sources. Eric Alterman called that “moving the goal posts” to use a sports metaphor.
All that said, a significant section, perhaps even half, of the population on the right instinctively and conscientiously know that they are wrong and are aware at some level of the pain that right wing policies can inflict. This portion of the population does not like it when the political bleeds into their every day life because it makes them uncomfortable. If you listen to sports talk – there is often a qualifier made by callers when discussing Schilling, BLM or Trump that “they don’t want to get into a political discussion, but….”
The excuse is that sports (or movies and entertainment) is supposed to be a diversion. It is in fact, in totality, the new opiate of the masses as we become less and less religious as a society. The same thing occurs on Facebook or other public fora – people don’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable. If we are ever going to make headway in this country it would be to make those people, who are still not affected by the cult that is Fox News Conservatism, feel uncomfortable because their beliefs are harmful to society at large. You do that by speaking to them individually and by being informed on specific topics – that is how one counters this issue culturally. Easier said than done of course.
never tire of seeing this: