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If you want to know how illiberal liberals can be and how cowardly liberal journalists can be, consider the plight of Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins.
Calkins recently wrote a column from the point of view of two female athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males. He was trying to make the point, he says, “that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.”
In a progressive place like Seattle, suggesting that biological males should not compete against girls and young women, is considered controversial.
“I spoke to people attending a rally in support of Sophie Cunningham,” Calkins writes. [The WNBA] Fever guard had recently taken a stance against biological males competing in women’s/girls sports, and a few dozen folks showed up to express their gratitude for her position.”
The column never saw the light of day. Editors spiked it. That’s journalistic lingo for … they killed. They refused to run it.
It wasn’t the first time editors at the Seattle Times refused to run a column Calkins wrote challenging liberal orthodoxies in the world of sports.
He had had enough, so he quit.
I have a special fondness and a special respect for Matt Calkins because what he went through I also had gone through, a few years earlier. When I was a correspondent on the HBO program “Real Sports” I also had a story spiked. It also was about trans athletes.
The story was about a trans woman college student who ran in long-distance races. Everybody in the “Real Sports” chain of command had approved the story: I did all the interviews; the producer signed off on it; the executive producer approved it; and Bryant Gumbel, the host of “Real Sports” who has the final say on everything, saw the story and gave it a green light.
The story was fair, objective and conveyed opinions from both sides of the issue. There was no in-house controversy. That apparently wasn’t good enough.
One day before the story was to air we got an email from the trans athlete saying she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want to be part of the story, and that if we ran it, with her in it, she would sue us.
This prompted more than a little urgency. The story was scheduled to run the next day. In a hastily organized conference call with Gumbel, the executive producer and me, Gumbel said: Normally I would say fuck off, we’ll see you in court — but we have new corporate owners and we don’t know how they’ll react (to a controversy involving trans athletes).
And he didn’t want to take any chances.
So over my very strong objection, Gumbel and his executive producer said let’s hold off on running the story — for now. They left me with the distinct impression that some version of the story would run on our next show, one month later.
It never did. They spiked it … out of fear.
What made their decision so disheartening was that “Real Sports” was a courageous show that took on the most powerful institutions in the world of sports. We did tough stories on the International Olympic Committee, on the NCAA, and on the NFL.
But we were afraid to run a story about a young trans woman who ran long-distance races in college.
Back to Seattle: In his farewell column, Matt Calkins says that, “I’ve always thought that it was a columnist’s duty to generate discussion on the most hot-button issues. To avoid such topics was to leave the reader shortchanged. I guess in the end, I just didn’t feel like I could do my job properly anymore.”
I thought the same thing about the role of journalism. We shouldn’t be afraid to run stories on controversial issues. That was the essence of “Real Sports.”
Not long after Gumbel and his executive producer demonstrated what I saw then, and still see now, as timidity, as cowardice … I quit, after 22 years working there.
Sports journalism, and journalism in general, has gone by way of the horse and buggy. To spike stories about trans-athletes displays a pathetic level of cowardice. Especially when transgender individuals make up about 1% to 2% of adults and youth in the USA. Suppressing these stories is antithetical to the core mission of journalism and violates the fundamental ethics and duty of the press. Generally, courage has no seat at the table of modern journalism.
Good article Bernard. I used like watching your segments on real sports on HBO , when I had cable TV. I stopped watching it after Gumbel kept saying that Unites States was a racist county, at the end of almost every show.