It’s been a little while since a president who worked in Washington called the press the enemy of the people. While we’re not back there yet, it’s moving in that direction -- for one organization named for (but not actually headquartered in) the nation’s capital.
Commanders president Jason Wright decided on Friday to publicly chastise a reporter who had posed a couple of blunt questions to quarterback Carson Wentz. On Saturday, before the team’s preseason opener, Wright vowed to do it again.
Wright said, via Nicki Jhbavala of the Washington Post, that it was “appropriate to defend our guy and stand up for our team in a direct and equivalent way.”
“I think the thing that you will see me doing more often is making sure that we are treating each other in a more up-and-ups way,” Wright explained. “I think we’ve done enough work over the last two years on building a healthy culture within the organization and honest way of working with y’all, that we can take plenty of criticism. . . . But it needs to be done respectfully.”
That’s a tough argument to make, especially for an organization that has a fairly recent history of not treating people (specifically employees) respectfully. And now they want everyone to just pretend that a decade of workplace misconduct never happened, to the point of at times flashing anger and/or frustration with the fact that people won’t just move on from a story that still hasn’t been fully told, because the salient facts continue to be hidden by the team and the league.
It’s even tougher to make that argument when there’s nothing objectively wrong or unfair with the tactics to which Wright objected. Here are both questions to Wentz that Wright found wrong, fully transcribed.
1. “There’s been kind of a narrative out there here in training camp that you’ve been a little inaccurate on your throws. Consistently inconsistent has been a kind of a terminology. How would you assess your performance in training camp, and is that [characterization] fair?”
2. “Real talk here, Carson. It’s been well documented. Philly didn’t want you. Indy didn’t want you. Do you think this is your last chance to prove that you can be a starting quarterback in the NFL?”
Were the questions candid? Yes. Did they get to the heart of the issues swirling around the team’s hand-picked quarterback for 2022? Yes. Were they constructed with words that fans and media constantly use when discussing Wentz’s current career prospects? Absolutely.
As one P.R. executive with another team explained it to PFT on Friday, that organization has no problem with any questions that reporters may ask. The team believes it’s the franchise’s job to prepare the players to properly handle anything and everything. (And, to his credit, Wentz did just that.)
Wright still didn’t like it, and he decided to take the issue to social media: “Thankfully, Carson demonstrated grace & class in response to this pompous, unprofessional mess. I recognize you have made a living on childlike provocation but it needs to be called out. Don’t expect special access and good luck building rapport with the guys.”
The tweet struck a nerve for me. It implies that “special access” is reserved only for those who play the game a certain way. In an age of league- and team-owned media, that’s a problem. And given that every team has its own in-house media operation staffed by people whose paychecks ride on not crossing the line, teams can get spoiled by softballs to the extent that they now resent curveballs more than ever before.
It’s just another example, frankly, of dysfunctional teams doing dysfunctional things. Taking on a reporter publicly is a sign of dysfunction. Warning the reporter (and, indirectly, every other reporter) that “special access” will be withheld is a sign of dysfunction.
“Why go out of our way to subject our guy to that as he prepares to lead our team?” Wright asked in response to another tweet expressing concern about the linking of access to asking questions in a way the team finds acceptable. This implies that Wentz is being treated with kid gloves by the coaching staff. If so, dysfunction. If not, and if Wright doesn’t realize that Wentz is being subjected to far worse by Ron Rivera and company, dysfunction.
In another tweet, Wright says he wants journalists to “follow standard practices.” One of the most standard practices in all of journalism is this: Don’t take a paycheck from the entity that you cover.
That continues to be the heart of the problem. Teams currently prefer the “standard practices” followed by those whose employment is tied to tiptoeing around delicate topics, to the point where teams expect the practices employed by team employees to become the standard, even for those who don’t get paid by the organization.
