At a time when our nation demands voices — with enough force to survive the vicious feedback — newspapers and websites continue to unload those who don’t agree with the company line. How do executives and editors think they’ll attract enough readers to carry on? The outlets that once stood tall had robust opinions across multiple sections, allowing people to keep reading for weeks and years.
Today, those places aren’t dying.
They’re dead.
Only the mushy operatives, who write what the bosses want, keep working. Why would anyone care when the daily content is so predictable in a world that requires enormous answers? I had a 25-year career as a strong American columnist and eight years as a daily ESPN TV analyst. I have a better career when I write what I choose at Substack, which runs my pieces regardless of how I stand or where I’ve been or the creepy reasons I left a paper in Chicago. My common theme: Explaining why so many softies allow sports to commit murder when powerful viewpoints are needed every day, amid ownership crooks who cheat us all and charge outrageous amounts.
Today, I applaud Matt Calkins. He left the Seattle Times because he chose to interview “two female student athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males.” He was a sports columnist for 11 years, long enough to gain the trust of a region when he deserved to be in sync with editors who respected his perspective. They should have published his damned piece. They refused.
He quit.
I have spoken of editors who were in bed with the owner of the Chicago White Sox and Bulls. I quit the Sun-Times because we were in China, where no one could post our internet pieces in adequate time at the Olympics, but also because bosses were bedridden with important men. I visited an editor about a still-popular figure who was pictured at a Christmas gathering with a second family — apart from his Chicago family. He changed the topic and asked about our collective “purpose” in life. I had another boss, a White Sox fan, who removed my column at the World Series after a fan hit the wife of opponent Craig Biggio and pulled her hair. I’ve talked about bad politicians in radio. No need to elaborate.
The focus is Calkins. If a columnist and talk-show personality can’t have singular beliefs, why were they hired? Increasingly, columnists are driven out of print when the writers who remain are political lackeys. With a WNBA franchise in town, Calkins was correct to address what Indiana’s Sophie Cunningham said last month: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” Whatever he wrote, his words should have been enough.
But he had one-sided editors. No editor should be one-sided. His superiors were controlling his mind when they had no right. That is not America, whatever America is at the moment. His take: “supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic.”
His column was effective for print and tech. A fine editor would have found a writer with the opposite opinion and run that piece. There you go: Readers take sides and keep reading. That’s not how it worked in Seattle, where Paul Barrett happened to be the recent president of the Associated Press Sports Editors. Imagine going to one of those conventions: Editors saving their asses and blaming the columnists, when the editors have no asses.
Wrote Calkins on Substack: “I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it. He told me later that day that he and others were looking at it, but that it wouldn’t be ready for Sunday’s paper. Monday night, I got an email saying that his boss was hoping to talk to the top two newsroom editors about it on Wednesday. No feedback had been given to me. Thursday afternoon, my editor informed me that it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance. I didn’t buy this reasoning. If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days.”
His resignation triggered more of his internal problems. Other columns were killed. “One was a piece questioning whether players for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit,” Calkins wrote. “Another was a more general column on cancel culture in sports. The last, written shortly after George Floyd’s death, implored people to listen to state-champion basketball coach Mike Bethea — a black man urging the public not to stereotype cops. The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.”
In a city that likes to think, over coffee and the Seahawks, what was wrong with those opinions? The pushback forced him to think whether he wanted to be a public-relations mope at the Times. When he was forced to wait for days, he thought: “We talk about being a voice for the voiceless a lot at the Seattle Times, and I feel like (female athletes) have not had a voice.”
His executive editor was Michele Matassa Flores. According to her bio, she and her husband have two grown children. The editorial board has nine names. Who has the guts to come out publicly and state their opposition? Calkins asked basketball fans who were supporting Cunningham at a Storm game. Why not ask questions and write it? His column would have helped the paper. Not running it killed the paper.
On social media, floods of people supported him Thursday. One was Frances Staudt, who was interviewed by Calkins: “Thank you. I was one of the female athletes you interviewed, and I truly appreciate the way you treated me. You were fair, listened to my story without judgment, and wanted to share my experience — even when The Seattle Times refused to let it be heard.
“It has become a left-wing rag that suppresses stories and viewpoints that challenge its preferred political narrative. Even at 17, I can see eerie similarities to what we’ve learned in history class about communism, censorship, and the control of information. To think that a 17-year-old female athlete and her story could be considered a threat to a powerful media machine like The Seattle Times shows that we have them against the ropes. We need to keep punching.”
The Times lost her as a reader. It lost many more, all because creatures inside the newsroom don’t spend enough time within the community. I follow the Sun-Times and continue to await coverage of Mark Walter, who launched his financial business in Chicago before he bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers. That is a potent business piece that could help change how sports teams are owned.
I wrote the editor-in-chief, Kimbriell Kelly. I haven’t heard a word from her. Her boss at Chicago Public Media, Melissa Bell, said the industry “has ceded a lot of distribution to places like Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, and I think that has done a disservice to centering civic discourse in a healthy way.”
Civic discourse? She doesn’t have centralized columnists in the city that created columnists. She spoke to me two years ago about possibly joining the staff. It didn’t happen. Someone got to her. Jim O’Donnell was the last standing sports columnist in Chicago. He was let go last month by the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, which needs a mouthpiece and an NFL team. The paper was purchased by the Tribune, which lacks a real sports columnist.
Calkins is devastated without a job. “To be honest, I’m scared s—tless right now,” he wrote. “I have no idea how the next few months or years are going to play out. But that fear beats the indignity of being muzzled.”
That is exactly why I left. Here I am today, one of the best sports columnists in America and certainly the best in Chicago — though I live in South Florida half the year and Paris for five months.
He should not be scared. He has given the country one more free voice.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.
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