Boston Red Sox team president Sam Kennedy told reporters Monday night the team received and accepted a White House invitation to meet President Trump. The Red Sox and the White House are still working out a date for the 2018 World Series champs to attend (possibly a spring training off day or during a road trip against the Baltimore Orioles), but they answered a question which many in the media had speculated about for more than a month. Regardless of what one thinks of championship teams visiting the White House, whether they think it cool or a waste of the president’s time, what is clear when this conversation comes up is the leftist bias of legacy sports media.
A WEEI columnist had a column Tuesday reacting to the news by saying, “I hate it and I wish they stayed home.” He was hardly alone. Right after the team won the championship, The Nation put out a column explaining why they did not think the team should attend and asked, “Do the Red Sox want to allow Trump — whose presidency is rooted in appeals to racism, sexism, and immigrant bashing — to bask in the glow of their victory?”
This only became a national story after the media instigated by asking Red Sox manager Alex Cora about whether or not the team would visit the White House, knowing he was not a fan of a Trump tweet questioning the reported death toll for Hurricane Maria. How did they know what Cora thought of this Trump tweet? They asked him about it in September, even though it had nothing to do with how the team performed on the field.
In President Barack Obama’s administration, the sports media thought it was wrong to skip White House visits.
This was evident when Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas dared not visit Obama after his team won the Stanley Cup in 2011. The response? Sports Illustrated declared he picked “wrong place and time” to make a political statement; ESPN wrote that “Tim Thomas put himself above the team”; and The Boston Globe added “Yesterday was not about politics and government until Thomas made it about politics and government.”
Keep in mind, this year ESPN’s Max Kellerman said the 2017 World Series champion Houston Astros were “on the wrong side of history” because they visited the White House. Not to mention, The Boston Globe, apparently averse to making sports political, declared in 2016, “We need answers from Brady and Belichick on Trump.” The piece argued that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick needed to be held accountable for their friendship with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In 2017, a survey by the Big Lead conducted among 51 sports media reporters found that more than 80 percent opted for Hillary Clinton while just under 4 percent voted for Trump. This may help explain why Mike Mussina gets more votes from sportswriters for the National Baseball Hall of Fame than the outspoken Trump-supporting Curt Schilling, now employed by both Breitbart News and the newly formed Blaze Media.
While Mussina got 63.5 percent of the vote earlier this year (75 percent is needed to be inducted), Schilling got just 51.2 percent of it despite having a better career ERA (3.46 versus 3.68) more career strikeouts (3,116 versus 2,813) and arguably the best pitching track record in postseason history (11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 career playoff starts and his +4.092 WPA in the playoffs is higher than any pitcher in MLB history). If sports writers’ politics weren’t a factor, he’d have a plaque in Cooperstown by now.
Not to mention this is why there are an endless amount of people in sports media begging for a Colin Kaepernick comeback — even though no NFL team wants him.
Both The Ringer and The Week have examined the liberalness of sports writing in the past, and Fox Sports’ Clay Travis hammers the point on a regular basis (oftentimes against ESPN) and has stated that sports media is “ten times as biased” as the regular media.
Remember, the sports media attends the same leftist liberal arts schools as the rest of the media, and 39 percent of “top-tier liberal arts colleges” in the country don’t have any Republican faculty members. A new study found that 39 percent of “top-tier liberal arts colleges” in the United States don’t have any Republicans on their faculties and in communications-related fields, the National Association of Scholars conducted a survey and found 108 left-wing professors at elite universities as opposed to zero right-wingers.
Plus, a Gallup poll earlier this year found that 62 percent of Americans believe the media is biased. Americans are right, the media is absolutely biased — and the sports media is major part of the problem.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
