Three Chiefs

Tuesday morning, the sports blogosphere was buzzing with criticism of the New York Post's news judgment. New York's beloved tab published stills of an illegally-captured video? And people are shocked, canceling their subscriptions? All that amuses me is that Andy Soltis authored the story. It's funny, because Soltis is normally the Post's chess columnist. The Chess Journalists of America named him Chess Journalist of the Year in 1988. He's written many books about chess. In this photo, from 1971, he's on the right, matched up against Bobby Fischer.

And this is his promotion? The grandmaster graduates to the gutter? I'm trying to imagine how things work at the Post's offices...

scene optimally consumed read aloud to oneself with accents and moderate word-slurring
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: Yo! Check it. This hot blonde who does the rugby matches, or whatever, for ESPN... she's totally naked in this video.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Come off it! No way!
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: It's her, man. Unbelievable! Got a light?
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Naw, man! I'm trying to quit. Now I'm hooked on Vegemite.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: This must be a story, right?
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Yeah. Who's going to write it? Nose game!
both men miss their noses
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: Aw, fuck it, let's use the wire services.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: But if we use the wire services, we can't put the word "sexy" in our lead. Or say "creepy cameraman" or "sideline siren."
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: Fuck, man, you're right. But who'll we use? Does Steve Dunleavy still work here?
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: He's long-gone, mate. How about Page Six?
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: I think they've gone off to do some blow with the cast of Gossip Girl.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Shit, you're right. Is there anyone in this office who can write a story about a creepy peephole video of dubious news value that's been on the internet for months and became big news half a week ago?

And, in this elaborate fantasy, Crocodile and Dundee wander the newsroom at, like, 4 p.m., looking for anybody at a computer who can squeeze out a lead and nutgraph and invert a pyramid full of dubious outrage, to be flanked by stills from the video.

They get to a dark corner, where a man sits with a typewriter and a chessboard, leaving his desk only for bathroom breaks and to send cryptic telegrams in Cyrillic to Garry Kasparov. Soltis's column appears just once each week. It's also short. What he performs at his desk are the travails of a true tortured genius, a man with twenty chess games simultaneously playing themselves out in his mind.

DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: Excuse me, Mr., uh,
SOLTIS: Grandmaster.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Flash?
SOLTIS: Soltis.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #1: Soltis?
SOLTIS: Soltis.
DRUNK AUSTRALIAN #2: Alright. Soltis. We have a story for you. You're getting called up to the majors.
SOLTIS: Thank God - what is it?

end scene, win Independent Spirit Award

And so we have accomplished chessmasters writing about Peeping Toms - yet the anger directed at the Post's editors seems to be inspired by some other decisions. Weird.

---

A real thought about the Andrews situation:
or

"Well that medal you wore on your chest always got in the way
Like a little girl with a trophy so soft to buy her way"
-For You, Bruce Springsteen (1973)

People seem to be claiming that EA is a journalist. This is false. She is a journalist just as much as Joe Morgan is, just as much as Brent Musburger is. She's eye candy for ESPN's telecasts, a cheerleader for the network's pro sports assets (she was an actual cheerleader while a student at Florida, which appears to have been surprisingly valuable job training).

Andrews was not a private citizen; she was a public figure. She stirred up controversy and the hearts of young men (and perhaps old men, like Andy Soltis) with her outfits and demeanor on ESPN telecasts, Bill Simmons' podcast, etc. She appeared on TMZ before the nude tape, after being hit in the chin with a foul ball at a Mets-Dodgers game - she was, is a celebrity.

Funny enough, the constituency rushing to defend Andrews has been the sports blogging community. The same sports blogging community that has vociferously attacked sideline reporters throughout the years, demanding that Andrews' forebears, like Suzy Kolber, Lisa Guerrero and Tony Siragusa, be taken off the game telecasts. This community also drew that thick line between sideline reporters (and other broadcasters) and journalists.

Lest you think this whole tape thing hasn't reignited the debate on female "journalists" in sports - look at this column. Or this one. And Andrews was involved in a similar brouhaha last August, after this column called into question her chumminess, bordering on flirtatiousness, with members of the Chicago Cubs.

Andrews wasn't asking for this. No one could be asking for this. An Adonis could sit completely disrobed in a hotel room for days on end - and wouldn't be asking for this. It's illegal, it's creepy, the whole thing.
But as a media event, it's funny. This media furor (especially online) ought to be like the uproar regarding nude pictures snapped, with a telephoto lens, from a mile away, of Jennifer Aniston. Remember that? Of course you didn't - the story didn't blanket sports blogs and make the cover of the New York Post on back-to-back days.

(A note, courtesy of Newsday's sports media columnist, the always excellent Neil Best: The Post's story Wednesday, unfortunately not authored by the exceptional chessmaster Soltis, quoted Best as though he had been interviewed, when, in fact, he had not. Big journalistic no-no; makes one wonder how many of the Post's interviews are shamelessly lifted from blogs or other newspapers. Maybe Soltis has a future as the paper's ombudsman, too.)

Anyway, back to the Aniston example: she's a celebrity, like Andrews - in fact, much bigger than Andrews, I'd imagine you'd grant - and is in the entertainment biz, again, like Andrews. I don't find that holding a microphone emblazoned with the ESPN logo makes you a journalist. Andrews plays a journalist on TV, and Aniston played Rachel Green, on the same medium to equal critical acclaim, I'd imagine. And the two are equally gorgeous with a small margin of error on that one - just ask Andy Soltis.

So why do sports bloggers ("We," maybe) rush to Andrews' defense? This whole thing means nothing about capital-J- journalism, which has enough problems as it is. This affects in no way women's ability to cover sports. It's about the invasion of a celebrity's privacy.

Some thoughts:
1) She was the girl on the ESPN games. Even though she looked like a model, and provided "sports journalism" like a model would (by this I mean both journalism from a clothes model and the model of excellence in sideline reporting), she wasn't. Instead of having to put up with Craig Sager's dumb interviews, useless tidbits (and crazy suits) from the sideline, we got Erin Andrews. She functioned like those sleazy Axe Body Spray commercials - we need to suffer through commercials (just as we need to suffer through unnecessary sideline reporting) - why not work in a little sex appeal?

Andrews' presence on our college sports telecasts was making the best of a bad situation.

2) Sports bloggers wrote about her and feel vaguely culpable. At Deadspin, Editor Emeritus Will Leitch wrings his hands about Andrews, feeling guilty because she drove their page views then and now. Leitch is sort of on point here, accurately capturing (I guess) how a writer partially responsible for the (allegedly) benign EA feeding frenzy must feel.

Of course, Leitch (a mild-tempered Midwesterner) might be missing this point: that the same people who visited his blog to look at clothed pictures of Andrews also went looking for the video. The video sparked a Google Search frenzy – that's not debatable - and posts about the clip appeared on Deadspin during the story's nascent stages. Any thought the two might be linked? Any chance Deadspinners viewed the clip before it was taken down? Any chance they, and the audiences of similar sports blogs, being the chief consumers of EA, might have driven the clip's traffic?

Some sports media bloggers, and choice commenters in the Deadspin community, have gone as far as to admit seeing and enjoying the video - saying that Andrews "looked good" while others go beyond that.

Perhaps the definitive word comes from Can't Stop the Bleeding, on which GC responds to Leitch.

"Everyone doesn’t feel guilty, Will. There’s no shortage of persons who neither pandered to meatheads or gave a minor talent like Andrews much more than a passing thought."

Damn straight. Most sports blogs, Deadspin included, are for good-natured sophomoric fun - making fun of athletes' grammar, public drunkenness and/or leering at the beautiful women occasionally tangentially related to sports. And to act like some delineation exists between what they were doing and the Andrews video (independent of its production circumstances) is silly and wrongheaded.

Of course they can't endorse a crime. But they can foster everything but.

And GC calling Andrews a "minor talent" is right. (See the chunk of this essay mentioning "models.") She was a talent just as much as any other empty-skirt sideline reporter is - good at a job that is ultimately meaningless, as far as sports journalism goes. But wait! Are Lesley Visser and Armen Keteyian taking umbrage here? I don't want to go after them. They wrote; they broke stories - they reported. They honed journalistic chops before being promoted to hours of underuse on the sidelines.

Andrews? She worked on some local sports telecasts in the South. Erin's father, Steve, a local television investigative reporter, won six Emmys and a national honor for investigative reporting.

Erin's a two-time honoree: as Playboy's Sexiest Sportscaster. Even Andy Soltis has more prestigious national recognition for his journalism.

Whether Andrews could rattle off creeds from Kovach and Rosenstiel doesn't really matter for her own well-being. Again, she wasn't asking for this.

And so you think I've wasted all your time with this Andrews-is-not-a-journalist screed. But I haven't. This doesn't matter for Andrews, who must be invariably scarred by the whole thing, and it doesn't matter for the vast majority of Andrews-loving sports blogs who will continue trafficking in sideline reporter skin once the next news cycle rolls around.

So, for whom does it matter? Well, silly, it matters for ESPN.

ESPN brings sports-related entertainment (SportsCenter, the telecasts of the games themselves), but also gathers and provides news (especially in its outstanding Outside the Lines series) and vaguely journalistic commentary. Maybe Chris Berman isn't a journalist, but Peter Gammons sure as hell is. Maybe Stuart Scott isn't, but Michael Wilbon is. Whatever Bill Simmons and Rick Reilly are, they're not only there for entertainment. And while former Mets GM Steve Phillips definitely isn't a journalist, former Blue Jays Special Assistant to the GM Keith Law writes some of the best baseball journalism you'll find today.

So ESPN's crew is a mixed bag of newsgatherers and talking heads. That we knew. And while the network has a strong profit motive (ESPN is, of course, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corp.) driving its decisions, one might think that ESPN should respect its newsy tentacles. (And ESPN has attempted to show that respect, as evidenced by hiring two extremely qualified ombudsfolk from newspaperland - George Solomon and Le Anne Schreiber - before recently naming Don Ohlmeyer to disgrace the position.) Its journalists aren't driven purely by dollar signs; in that case they would have chosen different lines of work.

They value news. They value the seriousness of what they're doing, even in sports. So I imagine, if one asked the journalists at ESPN, those with distinguished careers of reporting on sports, providing new analysis and uncovering facts, that they might admit their network's exploits drag serious reporting's credibility through the mud.

And those exploits are many - I suggest reading Michael Freeman's ESPN: An Uncensored History for an outdated but lengthy litany of said exploits - but I'll name a few: sexual harassment allegations against Harold Reynolds, Woody Paige, Sean Salisbury, Jason Jackson and Mike Tirico, anti-Semitic statements by Gregg Easterbrook, public drunkenness from Dana Jacobson, Colin Cowherd's DoS attacks against The Big Lead, and the abomination of SportsCenter's "Who's Now?" feature. And Jason Whitlock, one of the best sports columnists writing today (who has also sounded off on this Andrews thing, and is right), was summarily dismissed from ESPN for (fair) criticism of his colleagues at the Worldwide Leader.

This tape of Andrews, though in no way her fault, is just another off-camera exploit for ESPN. It detracts from the serious work that goes on there.

ESPN may sometimes do a great job of reporting the news, but far too often it makes the news or controls the news. In the case of this Andrews thing, it's done both. It hasn't reported on the story, which is okay, I guess, but a little strange, considering the AP's been all over the story, and "erin andrews" generates over 1500 hits in the last few days' Google news. It's turned up, as fodder for both news and opinion articles, in reputable papers throughout the nation.

When one of their own becomes the news, they can be upset, they can privately question the news value of the story - but after giving literally endless airtime to the internal machinations of Brett Favre and his Should I Stay Or Should I Go thing, posting a story on ESPN.com (which is mostly wire copy anyway) or mentioning it briefly, soberly on SportsCenter or OTL doesn't seem egregious. If there's a criminal complaint, an investigation - there's a story for ESPN to broadcast. They've gone with far more dubious material before.

But ESPN has acted on the story: they've given quotes to other news organizations about Andrews (though I can't say the quotes are really exciting fare), and, rather shockingly, ESPN opted to bar NYPost personnel from its telecasts. Why? Sez an ESPN VP,

"... Running photos obtained in such a fashion went well beyond the boundaries of common decency in the interest of sensationalism."

Now I may be an idiot, but considering ESPN's newsgathering imperative, shouldn't the network be adding correspondents to its roster?

The writers ESPN has featured on its TV channels and radio stations (Deadspin lists them here) are generally closer to the New York teams than the roster of national writers ESPN employs. Joel Sherman's Sunday baseball stuff is often very good, and his sources throughout MLB rival those of any baseball writer working today. Cannizzaro's reporting, on the PGA and the New York Jets, has been good as well. Kernan's more or less an idiot, but the central question about ESPN's swift decision applies for him too.

Why, on this non-story to no outlet but ESPN, did the WWL find another news organization's judgment reprehensible enough to deprive the Post's sportswriters of their credibility? No one banned the Times reporters from television or radio after the Jayson Blair scandal - relatively speaking, a far bigger journalistic transgression - and the Post's sportswriters obviously don't control what turns up on the front page of the paper.

(Except maybe the paper's chess writer, who is named Andy Soltis, and is a mad chess genius, in case you've forgotten. But is chess a sport? Does ESPN show chess? I remember they used to show Magic: The Gathering games on ESPN2. I once had a formidable white deck, in case you were wondering. Avatar of Hope? Great card. Neither here nor there.)

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether the Post's coverage went overboard - and, if it did, whether it went overboard considering the Post's illustrious history of doing just that. People don't read the Post's news pages for sober, serious coverage that teaches the reader new words and new understanding of foreign affairs. Instead the news section has funny headlines and a fifth-grade vocabulary. (On a side note, Lloyd Grove's 2007 New York Mag profile of NYP editor Col Allan is one of the best pieces of writing I've read in several years.) But the sports reporting can be quite good, certainly better than some of ESPN's reporting.

Add in ESPN's ignorance (for a few days, until this evening) of a sexual assault case filed against Ben Roethlisberger, and the pattern is that the network lives by its own code for what is and isn't news. Nearly every major outlet in the nation reported on the Roethlisberger allegations while ESPN ignored it, using some nonsensical justification that didn't mention the network's chummy relationship with Roethlisberger. ESPN has to play nice with the allegations, of course, for fear of losing access to a major NFL star. (Anyone who chooses to research Jim Gray's partisan defense of Kobe Bryant after criminal charges were filed might see that this is something of a pattern for ESPN.)

ESPN's omnipresence in sports media presents a big problem. The inherent conflict of interest in the network's ownership of live broadcast rights for most professional sports - which both taints news judgment (for example, ESPN maintains some pro sport hierarchy that invariably ranks the NHL fourth or worse among viewers' league priorities. Of the four major sports' broadcast rights, ESPN only lacks the NHL's. So they try to pretend that women's college basketball or Formula One racing are more important to its viewers. It's a business judgment masquerading as a news judgment, really) and gives ESPN a vested interest in the success of the sports its reporters cover - ought to be addressed.

So, quickly, a proposed solution: ESPN ought to establish a clear division between its news and entertainment programming, while leaving ESPN.com almost entirely under the former banner. On TV, signpost the news. Very carefully mark original, serious reporting, and hire editors to hold it to a higher standard.

As long as ESPN keeps hiring the Erin Andrewses of the world, though, it worsens those issues that currently exist within the network. It helps emphasize style over substance and extends uncomfortable and ultimately unethical closeness with athletes and teams. Give journalism a chance. --DICKEY

Later: Some introductions.