We already discussed yesterday the wave of new baseball stadium demands and the possible reasons why they’re all hitting right now. (If you need a refresher, Marc Normandin ran through them all yesterday.) But if MLB owners all seem to be working from the same playbook in much of this — issue renderings, threaten to move to Nashville — they also all seem to have hit on one common strategy: the “exclusive” media interview.
This week’s surge of owner Q&As started with that huge New York Times interview by longtime sportswriter Tyler Kepner with Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos, which didn’t exactly start out with a hard-hitting headline:
A Great Team, an Ambitious Plan and an ‘Existential’ Issue
John Angelos wants to reimagine the way Baltimore approaches the business of baseball, but his team’s electric young core may not be around to see the result.
Though built around an interview, this was really a profile, and the formula for profiles is that they’re generally kind to their subjects. In this case, that meant some scenes of Angelos chatting with fans, discussion of the team’s recent history of on-field performance (bad, until this year) and controversy (even worse after the team suspended its play-by-play broadcaster for reading negative stats on the air, though Angelos was allowed to brush that off with “Nothing like that is going to happen again,” and then a whole lot of owner-speak about his stadium dreams, like:
“People will speak about Baltimore like, ‘Wow, Baltimore is cutting-edge,’ which is what they said about Camden Yards. If we develop it right, and we include that impactful community program module, we can change the whole brand of Baltimore.”
And:
“If big markets like Boston and Atlanta are doing it, it becomes existential — how are we going to compete and keep pace? Everybody won’t be able to do it. But I think because of what’s here — the brand of this ballpark, this piece of property of 60-odd acres with other land around it that could be accessed, maybe bolted on, with the mass transit you don’t even have in Atlanta, with the great highway systems — we think it’s existential.”
Those are assertions that demand a lot of followup questions: How is redeveloping the harborfront area that was already redeveloped once going to change Baltimore’s “brand,” what about the Atlanta Braves‘ real estate development makes him think the Orioles can’t “compete,” how much is all this going to cost and why should taxpayers pay for it? But Kepner didn’t ask any of those, observing, “There are many details to untangle, of course,” then launching into a discussion of whether Angelos would really try to raise ticket prices to pay for re-signing his young stars, as he’s threatened to do, though the discussion remained one-sided since Angelos was allowed to give his side without any rebuttal from, say, a sports economist who could point out how ticket pricing and player spending actually work.
The same day as the Angelos interview, the Kansas City Star ran a Q&A with Royals owner John Sherman that was somewhat better in that it at least asked some hard questions, like “What are the specific financial asks you’ll make of the city and the state?” and “You said private investment would pay for the bulk of the stadium? Is that properly stating that point?” And the Star reporters did manage to extract some actual news from Sherman, getting him to acknowledge that there could be some infrastructure costs on top of his estimated $2 billion for the stadium and a surrounding ballpark district.
But because this was just a straight Q&A, Sherman, like Angelos, got to control the narrative without fear of being contradicted by other people or other facts. Take, for example, this exchange:
McDowell: There is a concern about siphoning off the (business) traffic from Power & Light.
Sherman: Oh, I think we’d drive traffic to [the] Power & Light [entertainment district]. Particularly in baseball, it’s 81 nights a year, bringing all those people down there. We couldn’t create enough right around the ballpark. So I think that’s a benefit to the city.
That is complete gibberish: Moving Royals home games to downtown and building a bunch of shops and restaurants around it would somehow bring so many people to K.C. that they would be forced to travel to the city’s other entertainment district, the one built adjacent to its indoor arena, to find someplace to eat between getting out of work and the start of the game? And there was no mention of how the Power & Light District and the arena are working out, which last we checked was very poorly, with massive seas of red ink that had to be bailed out with public funds.
Finally, owner soapbox #3 was a two-parter yesterday, with the Las Vegas Review-Journal offering an “exclusive interview” with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher while NBC Bay Area presented a “Bay Area exclusive” with Fisher, which means neither was actually exclusive. The Review-Journal, which has been cheerleading for the A’s move all along, lobbed multiple softball questions (sample: “Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said that he believes you would field a competitive team in Las Vegas because you won’t be spending upward of $100 million on the stadium development process in Oakland any longer?”) and didn’t question Fisher’s claims that “I think all but four ballparks in baseball are new since the early ’80s” (actually six: Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium, Angel Stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, and Kauffman Stadium) and that “the building of a mostly privately financed stadium” will “be the largest amount contributed by a baseball team owner of any stadium built to date” (hard to say, since Fisher still hasn’t divulged exactly what he plans to spend himself after getting $600 million in public cash and tax breaks). The R-J then lifted its paywall for the Fisher story initially (it appears to be back now), giving the A’s owner’s statements even more reach.
As the NBC Bay Area Q&A, it was if anything even more softball, perhaps best summed up by news anchor Raj Mathai’s tweet that “wasn’t expecting him to be so candid/revealing,” which confuses openness with a staged media event where the TV station was forced to agree not to record any audio or video. The interview did manage to induce Fisher to say one quiet part loud — “I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out in Oakland” is getting roundly dragged on social media — but aside from that, Fisher and his handlers have to be happy with how the day worked out.
There are two problems with these kind of “exclusives,” really: One is the way that journalists usually allow sports team owners to control the narrative, giving them tons of space to give their rehearsed talking points without fear of contradiction. (It’s the same problem with much political coverage, actually, though at least there sometimes an opposition candidate will get equal time to spew a different unreliable spin.) But even when the questions are more pointed, as in the Star’s interview with Sherman, simply providing that many column inches to the local rich guy preferences his side of the story: Team owners are presented as newsmakers, which is a different category than mere citizens or even experts, who are relegated to occasional rejoinders when they make it into the story at all.
It’s a tough situation, since exclusive interviews (or even fake “exclusives”) draw readers, and traffic is the name of the game in today’s media economy. But allowing team owners to duck questions for months or years and then rushing to let them say whatever they want in a safe, controlled environment with no rebuttal or fact-checking isn’t journalism — that’s stenography. Billionaires’ control of elected government through lobbyists and campaign funding is a big part of the reason why subsidies to the rich are continuing to soar, but their control of the media by withholding access except on their terms, and most of the media’s acquiescence in that, is a huge factor as well.
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