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How Objective Can Sports Stations Be Criticizing The Teams They Carry?
I never gave this a lot of thought, until I came across this story about WTEM, Washington D.C., the radio station that was the flagship of the newly renamed Washington Commanders NFL team. The station recently refused to renew the rights to broadcast the games, admitting they couldn't always cover them objectively, especially when both the station and the team were owned by the same person.
That's now changed, prompting this admission from AM 980:
“The organization and the company disagreed on the value of the broadcasts and the station believed it was also important to continue to be able to provide honest, objective information, analysis, and commentary about the Commanders,” [station owner] Audacy said in a statement...
"The statement suggests that it’s impossible to be honest and objective about the team while in business with Commanders owner Dan Snyder. The statement also points to the reality of conflicts of interest in sports media, where many outlets also have business relationships with the teams and leagues they cover."
On its website, the station makes it clear the staff felt hamstrung during the years they and the team were co-owned, but they'll now be able to cover it a lot more honestly. “It was important for us to be able to continue to provide what we provide on our talk shows which is honest, objective analysis about the team,” [host Kevin] Sheehan said.
All of which reminds me of The Blue Jays, The Fan 590 and Sportsnet, both of which hold the sole rights to broadcasting Canada's only Major League Baseball team - all owned by Rogers. It certainly could be seen as something of a conflict of interest to have the owner and the stations all tied under the same corporate umbrellas.
To be fair, I've never noticed the Fan shying away from criticizing the team in the years since Rogers took over, but now I can't help but wonder if there are any topics that are off limits on air that might upset the brass upstairs. I guess we'll never know - unless someone with knowledge wants to anonymously contribute an example here - but now I'll be listening with a far more critical ear.
Commanders’ flagship radio station leaves, says it can now be “honest, objective”
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Re: How Objective Can Sports Stations Be Criticizing The Teams They Carry?
It often doesn’t really matter whether the station and the owner are one and the same. I remember a famous incident from the days when CJCL was at 1430 and owned by the now defunct Telemedia.
The station owned the rights for both the Jays and the Leafs back then (the early 80s) and to be fair, the talk show-music hybrid format they were running didn’t exactly attract a lot of listeners. So the sports broadcasts were the station’s major source of income.
The guy who did the sports talk show there was the late Earl McRae, a veteran newspaper sports writer who made the transition to radio. He was a natural on air, with his often-hilarious comments, imitations, and quick wit, but he didn’t suffer fools gladly.
Because the station had the rights to two of the biggest franchises in Toronto, they had easy access to many of the players, managers and coaches of both teams and they were frequent guests. One night, McRae arranged for Leaf G.M. Gerry McNamara to appear on his show, which was called “Open Line Sports Tonight.”
I can’t quite recall what started it, but McRae verbally pushed McNamara into a corner, when he contradicted himself on some issue facing the Leafs. It made the G.M. look like a fool and he was some kind of pissed off when the interview ended. The next day, the host came back on the air and relived the entire episode, even as the newspapers began publishing articles about how the guy in charge of Toronto’s fabled hockey team had been made to look like an idiot.
At the time, the Leafs were owned by the irascible Harold Ballard, who didn’t take kindly to any opinions but his own. So he did what only Ballard would do - threatened to immediately pull the rights to all the games from CJCL if something wasn’t done immediately about that [bleeping] guy McRae. It would cost the company potentially millions of dollars - not to mention seeing the rights potentially assigned somewhere else.
Important to note that McRae didn’t do anything wrong, except for maybe slightly bragging about his exclusive moment on air the next night.
So what did Telemedia do in the face of this threat? They caved, of course, suspending McRae for two weeks as “punishment” and telling him not to let it happen again.
So perhaps the story out of Washington isn’t that unusual after all. It seems the big difference comes when a team is owned by one man or when it’s a faceless corporation behind it. The former can take things personally, while to the latter, it’s not such a big deal.
But it’s proof that it can happen here - and in the case of CJCL Toronto, it actually did.
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