Once upon a time, in a faraway land glistening with guard rails and street lights and the whirligig of police lights a young journalist fresh out of Northwestern University came to find himself tasked with the duty of reporting on sports business for a large and quite possibly evil media conglomerate. Darren Rovell was actually decent at his job then, much to the surprise of many of you reading right now. His byline didn’t appear multiple times a day, and his articles were in-depth and well-researched. These two details, for those who may not make the connection, are not coincidental. Indeed, they represent a serious problem with journalism as an institution, which is the actual point of this post. Before we get there, though, I have to show how we get there. So yes, this probably qualifies as a hit piece on Darren Rovell, but it’s not the point of the thing.
After a time, Rovell started appearing on air. Initially, this was a good thing, as he was called on to expand on (or simply reiterate, but that’s not a bad thing) his articles; sometimes, he was brought on to drop a detail that still hadn’t seen digital print yet in the midst of a developing story. It was after this began that the train started sliding off the rails. His contract was soon up, and he found himself in demand… and lo and behold, one of those enticing offers was from a television network who was more interested in him as a personality than as a reporter. He accepted that offer, and almost immediately everything changed.
His goals — from the perspective of this reader/viewer, I hasten to clarify, so this is all just informed opinion — seemed to shift from in-depth coverage of interesting sports business stories. Instead, it seemed as though Rovell’s modus operandi was to splash buckets of little infobits everywhere. Then came Twitter, and good gravy it got even worse. At this point, it seemed to almost degenerate into a desperate effort to continually tie some relevant sports business factoid into everything trendworthy… often in a manner which was tone-deaf and offensive. But we’ll get back to that in a moment.
His actual reporting, when he was, you know, actually reporting, started to suffer. There was the Meb Keflezighi mess, where Rovell handwaved Keflezighi’s 2009 win in the New York Marathon as being not that relevant to the recovery of American distance running because Keflezighi was born in Eritrea… without doing enough background to comprehend that Keflezighi had been a US citizen since he was 12. Now, once called out on this, Rovell did apologize without any attempt to backpedal or deflect. He needs to be credited for that, without question. This incident, though, preceded a further decline.
In 2011, there was the fiasco wherein Rovell tried to crowdsource stories about the impact of the NBA lockout on the little guy. Without following the absolutely cardinal journalistic rule of never, ever, EVER using anonymous information that you have not independently verified through another source, he let himself get duped into including a bit about how an escort service was suffering because the players weren’t around to offer their patronage. That source, it turned out, was completely bogus; he’d been flummoxed by someone he’d managed to annoy to the point of mean-spirited pranksterism. It was some time before the truth came out; when it did, he apologized but did so in a way which showed he just didn’t get it. Yes, the prankster was in the “wrong” to deceive him, but that didn’t excuse Rovell’s failure to properly check his source. In fairness, this is the sort of thing an editor should call out, but I think we’re all familiar with other instances where editors have done exactly that, been assured that the source is good, and then Pulitzers have been stripped and reporters fired and blackballed. Rovell’s attitude was “reporters get lied to all the time”, which is absolutely true… and exactly why you get a secondary source.
Twitter. Frankly, Darren’s a pox on Twitter; it’s not that he provides no value, but that it’s drowned in what I’ve already alluded to twice. It’s not that he tweets things like his astonished confusion over ESPN covering the Penn State scandal instead of NFL highlights. It’s things like scouring Twitter for some fan-made Jets logo with Tebow on the cross replacing the “T” and thinking anyone gives a crap enough for him to retweet it. Or breaking down star athlete’s salaries by day… or hour… or minute. Once that’s been done once, for any top-flight athlete, I think we get the picture, but Rovell seems to delight in it whenever a big contract gets signed. It’s things like having the unmitigated gall to tweet that he’s “confirming” a published story by a New York Times reporter. It’s things like bragging about how he gave advice to folks like Michael Phelps and Lolo Jones on handling their Twitter presence. (That’s between you and them, Darren. Bragging about it is gauche.) It’s things like turning peacock and wielding his follower count as if that means a damned thing when it comes to journalistic chops, relevance, or integrity. (Hint: when Rovell has 239,000 followers and David Wood — who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — only has 898, it doesn’t.)
And then there’s his series of mind-boggling embarrassments with Playboy Playmates and Kate Upton and walking around with his Twitter handle on his back and… man, I just don’t know. Let’s step back to the beginning of this post, though, and recall: Darren Rovell was a pretty good reporter once upon a time (and still is, on occasion). Darren Rovell was sane once upon a time, but may not be anymore, and it’s all because he’s let the idea of celebrity get into his head. This is not a phenomenon localized solely to Darren Rovell; many other journalists have found themselves lofted upward on the wings of increased exposure and lost their minds. Buzz Bissinger wrote one of the best non-fiction books of the 1990s, and has since become someone whose appearance on your Twitter timeline is a cue to go throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave because you’re about to watch a Michael Bay film in text. Rick Reilly is a sham. Jason Whitlock, who really honest to god was once a great columnist, turned into a caricature. We won’t even get into Skip Bayless.
The point is this: the best journalism is accomplished by people who are more concerned with gathering information and formulating it into a story than they are with marketing their brand. The moment a reporter (or a columnist) starts worrying more about getting on television or promoting a book or getting that Twitter follower meter to spin like an odometer, they’re no longer at the top of their game. That doesn’t mean they can’t do good work; it also doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be appearing on television or writing books or interacting on Twitter.
It means a real journalist is more concerned with journalism than attention. Bylines are important, because credit is vital, but to a real journalist the content sells the byline. To the public, the byline is an indication that the content may be worthwhile, and that’s as it should be. The problem with the mass-media celebrities you think of as journalists, however, is that they think the byline IS the content; that what they say is important because they’re the ones saying it. That’s something we should all consider a little more carefully.
This has been observed since the dawn of civilization: To covet fame, is to covet one’s own destruction.
Some might say–I probably would say–that modern civilization is a conflagration of self-destructive, voyeuristic twaddle – the tragedy of commons writ large. Rovell is us, and we are failing miserably with occasional moments of surprising competence sprinkled in.
There’s room for optimism, though. Information moves more quickly than ever before, for one. We may yet find a way to treat sociopaths for their lack of empathy, for two. Kindness, reasonableness, and love are observed daily, if not reported upon. The end is not written. We need only to get to work.
Let me know how it’s going. I’ll be at the bar.
Jon F. Morse takes on Darren Rovell…….. Headlines Please.