In a floor speech on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) invoked the indecisiveness of New York Jets coach Rex Ryan to settle on a quarterback as an analogy to castigate his Republican colleagues’ intransigence in negotiating a tax deal that will prevent the United States from falling off some kind of “fiscal cliff.”
OK, perhaps Ryan’s bad choice of Mark Sanchez, Tim Tebow or Greg McElroy is similar to the GOP’s inability to put forth a cohesive fiscal message, but that’s not what has us intrigued by Reid’s mumbly statement.
To preface his argument, though, Reid lamented that The Washington Post’s sports section isn’t “nearly as good as it used to be.” Hey, we love Post-bashing as much as any media organization that isn’t run from 15th and L (perhaps sometimes a bit too much), but not every swing at the old broadsheet is merited, including that taken by this former amateur middleweight from Searchlight, Nev.
Dan Steinberg, who runs the Post’s D.C. Sports Bog blog, took offense to Reid calling out his section, and frankly, he’s right. Steinberg grants some of Reid’s general nostalgia—”Nothing is as good as it used to be.”—but to slime the Post’s sports section as a disappointment is just wrong.
If anything, the Post’s sports section is one of its most solid daily components. Style is a purple-splotched mess; Metro, while full of solid local reporting, feels increasingly thinner; and political verticals like Wonkbook reek of wankery. Sports, though is delivered like a well-run island in a sea of editorial jittering.
Consider, well, Steinberg’s invitation to Reid to compare the Post’s round-the-clock sports coverage today to its once-a-day edition way back when:
Still, I invite you to come over to the office some day. We’ll print out every single blog item that we publish in a week, and stack them up next to every single print issue from that week. Then we’ll pick a random week from, say, 1971, and print out every single sports section from that week. Then we’ll read it all together. And then we’ll decide which group of readers would have been best informed about their local sports teams. It’ll be fun. I’ll buy the coffee and scones.
We’d side with Steinberg. For starters, probably 35 or 40 percent of our sports-related posts are just following what Steinberg (hell, we’re doing it right now), or his partner in blogging Sarah Kogod, reported on Sports Bog earlier in the day.
Then there is the beat coverage of all of D.C.’s teams. The Washington Times is about to give up on sports coverage (again), not that it was ever much of a competition. All year, the Post’s coverage of the Nationals captured the emotional thrills of the first great season of D.C. baseball in over 70 years; the paper is also as comprehensive on the ‘Skins and their attempt to ride a rookie quarterback’s success to a satisfying year and on the Wizards’ interminable futility. The All Met Sports vertical is about as broad a look at high-school athletics of any big newspaper anywhere.
As for the columnists, yeah, sports columnists everywhere can get tiresome, but the loudmouthed days of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon are long over. But the current lineup is smart and streetwise. And, honestly, I’ve always been a Tom Boswell fan, even when he delves into unbridled homerism.
The Post is also keeping apace with an NHL lockout that is threatening to kill an entire season—and maybe even the league itself. Searchlight, a dusty mining camp on the fringes of Las Vegas, probably isn’t much of a hockey town, but as a Democratic Party leader, Reid should probably take some interest in a labor dispute; he’d do well to read Tracee Hamilton’s columns and Katie Carrera’s reporting.
And when it comes to soccer, while DCist is home to the most passionate D.C. United beat writer around, even we’ll admit that Steven Goff, who writes the Post’s Soccer Insider column, has been on his game since joining the paper in the mid-1980s.
Sure, the Post’s Sports team isn’t perfect. Sally Jenkins was way too nice to former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno after he was fired for burying his head after being informed that his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, had been raping children. The glad-handing almost certainly helped Jenkins land Paterno’s final interview before he died in January. And Jenkins hasn’t addressed Lance Armstrong’s use of performance enhancing drugs, even though she co-authored the dishonored cyclists autobiography. Hell, even the Post’s local editor, Vernon Loeb, who co-authored Paula Broadwell’s biography of former CIA Director David Petraeus, offered a mea culpa when it was revealed his co-author was shtupping their subject.
But I digress. Back to Steinberg’s rebuttal of Reid. Yeah, nothing’s as ever good as you remember it, but for a newspaper with a lot of problem spots, the Post isn’t suffering because of its sports section. It’s the best part of the paper.
