Dodgy Questions
Sports reporters still don't know how to talk about politics with people like Jack Del Rio
Dear Readers,
One quick housekeeping note before we get to our story this week: We’ll be taking a brief hiatus next weekend, since both of us will be traveling and juggling a few other deadlines. So no newsletter next Sunday, and we’ll be back with fresh content on June 26th.
Happy reading,
Calder + Ian
Why can’t sports reporters just ask Jack Del Rio what he thinks about January 6?
Regular readers of this newsletter will know that we are no fans of the Washington Football Team, now known as the Commanders. For some context, our animosity is both personal and political. On the political side of things, the team—whose long-time mascot was a racist caricature of Native Americans—is owned by a demonic homunculus named Dan Snyder, who, when he’s not too busy harassing his female employees, has made a habit of cozying up to hard-line reactionaries on Capitol Hill. On the personal side of things, the team is responsible for Ian’s formidable—and uniformly bad—memories of professional football, which mostly involved driving intolerably long distances with his dad to the team’s stadium in the exurbs of D.C., only to watch grown men, dressed as pigs and intoxicated to the point of incapacitation, literally piss their pants with anger over the team’s reliably poor performance. (This is true.)
This week, though, we got another reason to hate the team, thanks to its defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio.
On Monday, Del Rio took to Twitter to cast doubt on the January 6 hearings that are currently taking place on Capitol Hill:
On Tuesday, Del Rio doubled down on his comments when asked about his tweet by the Commanders’ press corps, calling the storming of the Capitol a “dust-up” and arguing that it was somehow less bad than the Black Lives Matter protests were during the summer of 2020.
It hardly feels necessary to outline the firestorm that followed. On the left, a chorus of voices swiftly condemned Del Rio’s comments, with the president of the NAACP even chiming in to call on the Commanders to fire him.
On the right, the usual suspects have taken up Del Rio’s as their latest cause célèbre, denouncing attempts by woke libs to cancel Del Rio for speaking his mind.
On Wednesday, Del Rio tweeted a sort of non-apology apology, calling his choice of words “irresponsible and negligent” but doubling down on the reactionary thrust of his comments.
On Friday, the Commanders announced that they were fining Del Rio $100,000 dollars — or about 3 percent of his $3.5 million annual salary. But don’t worry — the penalty was accompanied by a strongly worded statement from Ron Rivera, the team’s head coach.
This is, by now, an extremely familiar scene—in the sporting world and elsewhere—and it strikes us as a complete waste of time to rehearse the usual arguments over this sort of thing. But as journalists and sports fans, it is worth trying to take a step back and make sense of what, exactly, is happening here, and what function this recurring discourse is actually serving.
First things first, Del Rio’s take on January 6 and the BLM protests is everything that his critics say it is—dangerous, racist, dishonest, and to our minds, more than a bit stupid. But it’s also not especially uncommon. In Washington, the leaders of the Republican Party have lined up behind the view that January 6 was, in effect, a “dust-up,” and various polls have found that a full quarter of Americans believe that it was a patriotic attempt to defend freedom. Should casual comparisons between attempted authoritarian coups and protests against murderous agents of state power be a regular part of political discourse? No. Are they? Yes, unfortunately.
None of this is to defend Del Rio. If you choose to publicly profess your sympathy for a fascist coup, you deserve all that ensues. But from a journalistic point of view, Del Rio’s comments are not particularly unusual or extreme. Surely it’s not surprising that, in a football organization of 70-some-odd people, at least some people believe the Republican Party line that January 6 wasn’t a big deal and that the “domestic terrorists” in BLM are the more serious threat. Indeed, millions of people around the country believe this same thing, and a lot of them believe an even more madcap version of it. Certainly Del Rio is not an anomaly in the NFL.
Against this background, how should sports journalists respond when they learn that one of their subjects has drunk the Fox News Kool-Aid? Here, it’s instructive to look closely at the questions that the Commanders press corps actually asked Del Rio about his tweets.
The question that prompted Del Rio’s “dust-up” comment, captured in a few videos that circulated online, was fairly abstruse: “Why is it not important to you, like, if your players are concerned about what you said?'' an off-camera reporter asked. Del Rio, seizing on the unfortunately hypothetical, snapped back, “If they are, and they want to talk about it, I’d talk about it with anybody.”
A loose transcript of the rest of the exchange—tweeted out by Nicki Jhabvala, a reporter from The Washington Post—suggests that the rest of the exchange continued in a similarly subjunctive mode:
None of these questions get to the heart of the matter: What does Del Rio believe about the January 6 insurrection, and does he actually think it’s morally equivalent to the BLM protests? Instead, the reporters insist on engaging in a bizarre (yet all-too-familiar) charade in which they insist on couching their questions about Del Rio’s political beliefs in confusingly-worded questions about the impact of those beliefs on his football team. Later that day, Jhabvala tweeted a transcript of an interview about Del Rio’s comments with the Commanders’ head coach, which displayed the exact same rhetorical quirk:
This is a habit that a lot of sports reports revert to when asking players and coaches about political issues, and it’s instructive about how these reporters understand both their jobs and the broader relationship between sports and politics: Because sports and politics are somehow ontologically separate, and a beat reporter’s job is to glide frictionlessly along in the world of Pure Sports, reporters must find a way to frame their political questions as sports questions in order to ask them. If you can frame it as a hypothetical—so as to avoid pissing off a subject upon whom you depend for important access—then even better.
Beyond the obvious shortsightedness of this approach, there are a few major problems with it. The first and most obvious one is that it causes sports reporters to ask silly, dishonest questions. In all seriousness, who cares if Ron Rivera thinks that his coach’s vaguely fascist sympathies will affect the Commanders’ locker room dynamic? The answer, of course, is absolutely no one—not even the reporter asking the question. This is a pretty good sign that it’s a bad question.
Another major problem with this mode of questioning is that it gives the subjects an easy way out. What reporters and their readers really want to know is whether Del Rio actually believes what he says and consequently whether his boss stands behind him. But when reporters instead ask hypothetical questions about the effect of these comments on team dynamics, the subjects don’t even have to dodge the question. The reporter has done that for them.
Finally, it holds reporters to a rhetorical standard that the subjects are not holding themselves to. Del Rio did not couch his commentary on the January 6 hearings in some broader observation about the Commanders’ on-field performance. (For what it’s worth, we can’t even imagine what this would look like.) When sports figures make straightforwardly political comments, reporters should ask them straightforwardly political questions. It won’t break the Matrix.
The obvious conclusion here is that the purpose of these exchanges isn’t to illuminate a subject's understanding of an issue—it’s to generate fodder for outrage. If beat reporters actually wanted to understand what Del Rio believes and why he believes it—and, not for nothing, why a non-negligible portion of the country believes the same thing—they could have asked him any number of things. For instance: What does he believe the value of the property damage caused by BLM protests was compared to the property damage caused by the January 6 riots? Was he aware, for instance, that on the same day as his comments, the Justice Department had indicted four right-wing militants for their role in the “dust-up,” charging them with seditious conspiracy? Did he believe that the death of Capitol Hill Police officers on January 6 was morally comparable to the property damage caused by the BLM protests?
These questions may have actually engaged Del Rio’s beliefs and meaningfully challenged some of his more obviously incorrect assumptions. Instead, the reporters asked oblique questions that exposed just enough about Del Rio’s beliefs to make people mad without actually doing the difficult work of trying to get to the root of his beliefs. As a consequence, nothing will change. Liberals will continue eagerly calling for Del Rio’s head, conservatives will continue to dig in behind him, and Fox News—whose parent company pays the NFL billions of dollars to air its games—will continue spewing the same bullshit to millions of viewers every night.
The bottom line is that authoritarian coups are bad and we should do everything in our power to prevent them. But losing our minds every time someone repeats a Fox News talking point outside their studios does nothing to prevent that—in fact, it probably makes it even more likely.
For sports journalists more specifically, accepting that sports are inherently political means assuming the responsibility of doing careful, nuanced reporting on people whose beliefs you find dangerous and abhorrent. As this latest episode demonstrates, the Washington Commanders press corps has yet to fully accept this responsibility.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . homophobia and the Tampa Bay Rays? “Rays Pitcher Who Didn’t Wear Pride Patch Hides Behind Jesus,” by Samer Kalaf in Defector.
. . . the problems with corporate Pride in sports? “The Tampa Bay Rays, Pride, and the Perils of Corporate Branding,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (June 8, 2021).
. . . the NFL’s latest cowardice on sexual assault? “Deshaun Watson’s Case Tests the N.F.L.’s Resolve, and Its Values,” by Kurt Streeter in The New York Times (June 9, 2022).
. . . the ongoing scuffle over a new Saudi-backed golf tournament? “PGA Tour suspends players in Saudi-backed event as golf’s discord deepens,” by Adam Kilgore and Matt Bonesteel in The Washington Post (June 9, 2021).