Let’s not give the prime players on the NFL beat too much credit for being angry right now.
The Adam Schefters of the world lit into the league and commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday, after horrifying video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice beating up his now-wife Janay Palmer was released by TMZ. For a moment, the folks who do a tremendous job of reporting the various roster moves and daily goings-on around the NFL while turning a blind eye to the league’s more repugnant actions showed the slightest glimmer of conscience.
But it wasn’t moral indignation that led the insiders to spout off at the NFL for its weak two-game suspension of Rice back in July. What upset them was being made to look like fools by the same entity for which they typically serve as unofficial mouthpieces.
It’s well past time for people to stop treating TMZ like the kid’s table and accepting its scoops only with a hefty amount of skepticism. TMZ now has beaten traditional media outlets on the death of Michael Jackson, Donald Sterling’s racist rant and Rice’s domestic violence, to name a few. However it acquired those scoops, on stories the mainstream outlets declined or lacked the resources to pursue, TMZ picked up the slack and changed the face of two of the world’s largest sports leagues.
And TMZ isn’t the only one. Deadspin did an excellent job of laying out the NFL’s apparent lie about not seeing the elevator video earlier, in contrast to what Schefter, Peter King, Chris Mortensen and others reported this summer, to their consternation. SB Nation outlined three ways the NFL is a “broken system.” You don’t need a hard-copy publication or a multi-million dollar TV studio to do good work.
In this case, in fact, having those advantages actually might have been a detriment. The sports-entertainment blogging culture obviously is not without its faults, and several of the bigger sites are not the moral authorities of the Internet that they fancy themselves to be, but they can’t be dismissed just because real stories happen to sit alongside photo galleries of bikini-clad women on their home pages. Not anymore. Not after the NFL media industrial complex was so thoroughly taken to school.
The NFL, despite its absurd popularity, is in a tenuous spot. As John Schulian recounts in his recent anthology of great football writing, a significant reason for the NFL’s rise in popularity was its greater accessibility to younger writers and fans at a time when the historical sporting powers of baseball, boxing and horse racing were becoming stodgy and exclusionary. People felt alienated by the arrogance, which is something the NFL surely doesn’t need now with fans already being turned off by what we now know is the extreme violence of the game. Boxing’s how-dare-you-suggest-our-fights-might-be-fixed attitude is not too far removed from Goodell’s seeming belief that he could simply wish the Rice situation away. Both smack of the implication, “Do you know who we are?”
This might be the beginning of the end for Goodell’s tenure as commissioner, but the NFL obviously will march on. Still, the shield has suffered another kink. The truth about head injuries now is almost universally accepted. The absurd cowardice of a league that issues season-long suspensions for marijuana use yet only comes down with a similar punishment after a fiancée-beater’s contract has been terminated is apparent. More and more announcers and media outlets are refusing to use the clearly bigoted Washington Redskins nickname on TV and in news stories.
Good for them, honestly. It’s high time the folks in traditional media channels caught up to what many of the lowly outsiders in non-traditional channels have been saying and doing for years.
