Dead Wrong
Why sports journalism utterly sucks
LEFTIST ideologues are incapable of abiding by any boundaries while dictating what society is doing wrong from their soapbox.
While the average person finds using innocent people, especially children, as political pawns distasteful, it’s the recipe that uniquely satisfies an ideologue’s palate.
Sports media’s marriage to the tactics, objectives and language of the progressive left has led to the birth of a gluttonous monster that prefers to devour any person who’s out of bounds rather than on the field. And when its appetite isn’t fulfilled, it will plant the seeds of a story to later consume when it sprouts into public view.
This is exactly the sports-media environment that rationalizes Deadspin using a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan, Holden Armenta, as the symbol of what’s wrong with our society because he wore face paint and a headdress to a football game.
Deadspin senior writer Carron Phillips lambasted the 9-year-old for allegedly wearing “black face” and appropriating a headdress and chastised the NFL for not “speaking out” against the child — calling it an example of “racism and hate.”
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once,” Phillips wrote. “This is what happens when you ban books, stand against Critical Race Theory, and try to erase centuries of hate.”
What Phillips didn’t convey to his audience: The 9-year-old boy is of Native American descent, and he was wearing black and red war paint, one color covering each side of his face. Even the picture used to accompany the piece showed just one side of the boy’s face — the side painted black, of course.
This out-of-bounds attempt to make an example of a 9-year-old child led the parents, Shannon and Raul Armenta, to hire a lawyer to demand an immediate retraction from Deadspin: “You must publish your retractions and issue an apology to my clients with the same prominence and fanfare with which you defamed them.”
Carron Phillips sounds more like Karen Phillips as he manufactures faux outrage with rhetorical crocodile tears to get the attention of passersby in hopes of garnering emotional sympathy for an event that didn’t happen and becoming our next racial Paul Revere: “White supremacy is coming! White supremacy is coming!”
There’s been poison in the wells of sports media for many years. A former avid consumer of sports-entertainment journalism, I finally had to quit drinking from it. It’s poisoned the whole profession.
Nearly the entire sports-media industry has zero interest in discussing sports or preserving American traditions. Instead it injects off-the-field narratives into meritocratic athletics and berates us for wanting none of its political nonsense.
Some of my earliest pleasurable memories include years of tuning into ESPN’s SportsCenter in the morning and listening to playful sports banter between sports journalists. The poisonous well has decayed this enjoyable experience for me and many others.
Now sports journalism is filled with midwit wannabe politicos, leftist ideologues and talentless influencer types (sometimes all three in one individual), and they all think they’re better and smarter than the audience they’re paid to entertain.
It’s why at least half the sports television shows are debate shows — it resembles a political format, and it’s the easiest way to discuss any loosely affiliated sports story ad nauseam.
Sports journalists’ daily objective is to emphasize how sports are a microcosm of our society, which both need constant addressing (with commercial breaks in between).
I no longer patronize sports entertainment or journalism like I used to because of people like Carron Phillips who claim the title of sports journalist while their purpose is to find — or manufacture — social ills.
The old jovial sports journalists have been replaced by people who take themselves too seriously and put their endeavors ahead of the games they’re supposed to be covering.
They don’t care about the average sports fan, not even innocent children like Armenta, because they’re elitists who think they’re superior.
They don’t respect sports fans, so I don’t respect them either.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.