Foul Play: Can I be Bill Simmons, too?

By Eshaan Joshi

Bad journalism is a scourge on this earth — a plague which needs to be snuffed out.

Unfortunately, the Motion Picture Association of America, upon receiving no less than three letters about the foul language in The Tartan, has officially remanded us. We can no longer speak in the way sports fans crave. If you spot any strange and unnatural words, I blame the Hays Code.

I didn’t really know what to write this week. Sports is sort of dead right now — there’s something strange happening in the NBA, obviously. The Yankees have managed to parlay a genuinely good off-season start into a complete fuddle-duddle. Jim “steak goes well with milk” Harbaugh is coaching for the Chargers. It’s Pro-Bowl Weekend!

But with all the sports being in this limbo, I really had only one thing to talk about.

I really, really, really hate sports journalism now.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s always been a bunch of junk, but it’s gotten so much worse. Firstly, ChatGPT has genuinely killed the need for journalists. You can get a couple quotes, a brief box-score of the game, feed it into the AI, and walk away with an article no worse than letting ESPN’s flavor of the week vomit onto the page. That’s just part of the problem, but it’s killing sports journalism as a genuine field with effort and prestige. It used to be important being the guy on the sidelines, or the people on SportsCenter, or anything on the radio, but those roles have slowly and surely been turned over to hot-take artists (Skip Bayless, anyone?) and faux outragers (the entirety of the Boston Sports Guy’s career), and is just generally in a place that you don’t want to be. We’ve seen more success in the podcast field, with people like Pat MacAfee and the like parlaying that into money, but sports journalism as an industry is dying.

It doesn’t help that I don’t think sports journalists are familiar with the topic of sources. You’ll see a headline reading, “Some say that it is likely that Patrick Mahomes may consider moving to New England if the compensation is right,” and man, that’s entirely meaningless as a statement. That’s half of the scoops in sports these days. Nobody actually knows ball, we’re not getting news, we’re getting speculation about speculation combined with a good helping of genuine honest-to-god yellow journalism.

It’s a part of a greater problem — there’s not really much left in ESPN. The one-time titan of the industry has been seeing greater competition, and has also fallen into the same outrage-fueled content as a lot of regular media. CNN started overusing the “Breaking News Chiron,” and ESPN started overusing the hot take show. On top of that, social media means I don’t actually need to look at the news anymore. If I wanna see Antonio Brown talk about something stupid, I can open his social media account from the site formerly known as Twitter, read his tweet about whichever players he’s currently trying to argue with, and then close the app. I’m closer to the athletes than ever before.

But I’m further from caring about the industry. It’s one I used to love, one that used to keep me up watching reruns on ESPN trying to see all the highlights for the Giants. The industry that brought me those two Super Bowl runs is the industry that’s dying today.

If that ain’t a tragedy, I don’t know what is.