Do We Actually Need Press Conferences?
This was a topic du-jour in sports a month ago when Naomi Osaka skipped a press event, got fined for it, and then released a statement about her struggles with mental health and pulled out of the French Open. I wanted to make a comic about it when it happened but the timing was off and well, now here we are. I don’t think I really have an answer to the question, but I think it’s one worth discussing. Are press conferences actually as necessary as they seem to be?
Seems to me like their importance has essentially been born from the absurd 24-hour coverage cycle and not an actual need. So many reporters need to grab a quote so they can fill their small recap articles in the next day’s blurb. It would be absurd to have each of them talk to the athlete/coach/person in question individually, so you hold a quick press event where everyone can ask a question and steal the answers from other questions for their own report. It efficiently solves a problem that the news cycle essentially created. But it generates its own consequences. Press conferences are boring wastes of time 99% of the time, and the 1% is when something goes hilariously wrong thanks to high emotion or you get one of the few players who actually enjoy it and make it into a thing, like TO or Clinton Portis.
So you have the individuals giving the same tired answers to the same tired questions. The reporters need something to boost their own profile to make them look good to the boss, so they press harder trying to break the individual into slipping. The individual, in turn, adopts a turtle shell in defense and either gives the most boring cliche answers humanly possible to avoid any sort of drama, or just responds with outright disdain and contempt. Since the reporters are fucking desperate for anything different, the contempt often becomes a story itself. Marshawn just didn’t want to answer dumb questions and that backfired on him by turning his disdain for stupid questions into the biggest news story of the super bowl. Belichick has earned a reputation of disdain as well, and only after years and years of the same disdain have people stopped writing about it. So the entire thing is a feedback loop as we crave more content.
To bring it back to Osaka, she revealed she’s struggling with her mental state, which brought a slew of support, as well as criticism. I think both sides are fair. The bottom line of any job is that there are parts to it that just aren’t fun but have to be done. Osaka gets paid more money than I’ll ever see to smack a green ball back and forth, talking to reporters about how she just wants to hit the ball as best she can doesn’t seem like that big a drawback. On the other hand, she’s young and facing the kind of attention normal folks like you or me don’t have to face, day in and day out. It’s tough. Same for anyone like her.
This is why I don’t think we should actually eliminate press conferences and media meetings, but I do think we should reduce the amount that is mandatory and for who, because most of the time it just isn’t important. I think coaches should have to talk to the press more than the players. Coaches and executives are better representatives and can speak to larger aspects of the game and give the reporters their quick deadline bylines. But maybe we don’t need players to sit there after a regular-season loss and face the same stupid questions every time unless the player wants to say something. It’s in a player’s best interest to keep their mouth shut at a press conference. You get better results when you approach them in their own element and form an actual working relationship with a player like reporters are sort of supposed to do. A sporting match of any sort normally has enough worth talking about within it without the need for Tom Brady to say “We went out there and it was tough but this is a good bunch o’ guys and they stuck with it and made it happen”. We don’t need the player quote unless they want to give it most of the time.
But I’ll never fully endorse eliminating the press meeting afterward because the rare post-game meltdown freakout is worth it every time. I do fully endorse banning reporters from getting sanctimonious about the importance of press events because they just aren’t that necessary and if you were a good reporter you’d have inside sources and built up relationships you could turn to any time you really need them. That’s why I’ll also always endorse people like Marshawn Lynch showing contempt for the bullshit.
I guess this is technically my first Tennis comic, huh.
I’m with the Midtown Marketer. Dave, how did you feel putting together this comic? How well does it compare to the rest of your body of work? Also, how’s your dog?
“First Dave, your thoughts on tonight’s comic.” “Dave how satisfied/disappointed were you with tonight’s outcome?”
I started paying attention to the Canuck’s post-game pressers because some other media were reporting that coach Travis Green was getting snippy in them. Substitute Travis for Dave, and literally every presser I saw, Brendan Batchelor started off every presser with these two questions or slight variants of them.
We need more pressers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuHFqw0yL5g . (SFW)
> than I’ll ever see to smack a green ball back and forth
…green?
Tennis?
More of a chartreuse, really. Chartreuse = fluorescent green/yellow.
The Atlantic has a surprisingly detailed discussion of the colour of the ball:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
With Osaka, part of the problem was that her first major post-win press conference was not about her or her win, but about the Serena Williams on-court meltdown that happened. So she never even had the chance to enjoy the win at all. Plus, pretty much every press conference for her had at least one of those “how does it feel to be a mixed-race minority idol”-style idiotic questions. So, combine that with public anxiety to begin with, and I can see where she would suddenly decide she needs time away.
sancity
Also, my favorite Belichick press moment came at, I think, a Super Bowl media event. He was doing his standard thing, rolling his eyes and dryly muttering a few words to every dumb question. Then a young kid (representing a school newspaper or something) asked him a legitimate, football-related strategy question. His eyes lit up, and he immediately launched into a full explanation behind it, while the “real” reporters stood there dumbfounded.
It’s not just kids, but he does seem especially gracious with non-traditional reporters. The “Belichick only mumbles through non-answers” narrative has always been lazy. If you pay attention to his whole press availability, he definitely gives that attitude towards the stupid questions, and the ones the local reporters have to ask to avoid trouble with their bosses for not asking, but when reporters go deep on strategy, or history, he can give super long and interesting answers. I don’t like the amount of disdain he shows for the routine questions, as I think it’s part of his job to answer them, but the idea that he ONLY gives the mumble, non-answers is not even close to accurate.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s less disdain and more bored resignation to having to give canned responses to the same generic questions you’ve gotten for literally in a situation more than familiar to anyone who’s been banished to man an IT helpdesk*. That said, the same press conferences highlight why press conferences should be phased out (or reworked) as they seldom yield more than the same canned answers regardless if it’s Belichick (or Tomlin or Reid………) as noone really has the inclination (or luxury) to delve into detail on why a strategy worked (because competitive advantage) or how player X dun goof’d (because throwing people under the bus usually has blowback.. just ask the Leader of Men!
* Aka the place where your sanity/soul/faith in humanity dies with every “Wait, if the router is wireless, how come it has to be wired to my wall socket?” or outraged “This (horribly underpowered even at the time) computer is barely a decade old, yet you’re telling me I can’t run X on it?!” call
The IT desk is the best. One day we had this psychology professor come down into the basement and start rambling about the Satan-worshippers within the school. He kept talking in the next room over with our boss about how all these sinners would burn in hell. My co-worker (a gay man) was like “If I told him how much I sinned on a daily basis would you attend my funeral?” 😛
Heh, maybe things have gotten better nowadays (Bible thumpers that ironically miss the whole “God is love” / “He who is without sin” stuff aside), but we still have PTSD from the netbook age, where everyone and their grandmother was bringing their cursed Atom-packing (and not the ‘barely adequate ones’, I’m talking OG N270’s)Inspirons and HP Minis to “get overclocked or something” so it could run Fallout 3/FIFA/etc. On the plus side, we were the few people unburdened with a capped and restricted connection on campus, which did wonders for our “media/game collections”.
Oof, that sounds horrendous.
It’s not nearly that bad nowadays, although I worked mostly in AV/Media so I didn’t get the day to day inanity that the others did. Got a job as a teaching assistant right before the pandemic, dodged a bullet there, IT during the pandemic must have been a travesty.
I have never understood the need for a presser after every game, especially in MLB. Why do we need a press conference after some meaningless early season game where nothing interesting happened?
As a big auto racing fan, I do find that gripes about press conferences can ring a bit hollow when race car drivers (even at the highest levels of the sport) are often expected to talk to the media AND be polite and gregarious when doing so mere minutes after an incident where not only was their chance of winning dashed by someone else’s mistake or a mechanical failure, their health/safety/even life itself may have been genuinely threatened. They do this because they understand that their availability and their demeanor are critical to media, fan, and especially sponsorship interest in their sport and in them personally.
These expectations are pretty common across the world of professional sports, really. Not talking to the press presents genuine problems for all but the very top professional athletes and all but the most popular sports leagues, pretty much all of whom are striving hard for slices the world’s limited supplies of attention and money.
While the sanctimoniousness is pretty unbecoming, I can understand why reporters often react angrily when their access to the subject of their reporting is constrained. In many cases these days, impressing their boss may be the difference between a reporter surviving the next round of layoffs or not. Let us not forget when looking at both the athlete and the reporter sides of this issue that press conferences themselves are not really the invention of either group, but rather a compromise between their bosses, the media outlets and sports organizations, that allows the media outlets to receive the content that keeps them in business and the sports organizations to continue to use the media to promote their sports while gatekeeping their athletes for reasons good (keeping the athlete’s time away from the sport from being filled with media requests) and less good (having tighter control on what is reported about their team/league).
“The bottom line of any job is that there are parts to it that just aren’t fun but have to be done. Osaka gets paid more money than I’ll ever see to smack a green ball back and forth, talking to reporters about how she just wants to hit the ball as best she can doesn’t seem like that big a drawback.”
This right here. Without the fans and the reporters athletes wouldn’t be able to make a living off of what they do. They would have to do it part time while working other jobs, and/or seek a sponsorship that would be just as taxing from a mental health standpoint, and way more constricting in other ways.
Every athlete deserves to put their own health as priority number one. Pro Bowl guard Brandon Brooks missed games for the Eagles dealing with anxiety issues. He learned healthy coping mechanism, and returned to the field better than ever. Until he got injured…then injured again…
One thing I think we can all agree to get rid of though is the on field half time interview. Nothing of consequence ever gets said. It is an exercise in abuse for the sideline reporter as they have to ask the dumbest questions while the head coach radiates hatred at them.
Fully agree.
I think that if a player just decides they would rather pay the fine than do a press conference, that should be accepted. And the Marshawn Lynch defense should also be allowed.
To me, the crappy thing about the osaga (Get it? Osaka saga?) is that she outright said “hey I’m cool with fining me” and then the grand slam committee just decided that’s not good enough and blatantly tried to browbeat her into submitting via forfeiture, and she withdrew to stick it to them and it worked. They IMMEDIATELY turned around and went “woah hey let’s not do anything hasty here, we’ll be glad to talk to you about what we can do here.” Just a classless move on the GS committee’s behalf imo.
I get the concept that athletes makes tons of money and should just have to put up with these things that don’t mean anything, but this situation is a bit more nuanced than that. The French open press has a rep as being kinda racist, as Coco Gauff can attest. Osaka didn’t want to deal with that. But even generally, if someone doesn’t want to appease the overlords, in no way should anyone be threatened with forfeiture of current and future tournaments for something as absolutely nothing as a press conference. Fines are fine, just leave it there.
Oops, didn’t think my 1st comment went through so there’s a revised version further down. Guess it did. Sorry!
Osaka is a fucking cry baby. Probably learned it from her match with Serena.
Osaka had every right to be upset with how she was treated by those jackals, if you can’t see that then just go
Jackals? They are reporters asking questions, my god people are soft. Also LOL go where? Calm down lil fella, it is just a internet comment…
A lot of media people try to ask questions and intentionally get a player in trouble so that they have a juicy scoop. While I get it’s their job, let’s not pretend that the media are just “asking questions” in an innocent manner. Especially the french open press.
Oh please. The media isn’t some fucking boogeyman, fucking grow up.
If anyone needs a press conference, it’s each sport’s officiating, to explain why they made the dumbass calls that they did
this
This is a pretty good idea. If i may fine tune it, I wouldn’t force the officials to talk about every game, but if an egregious call was made I am all for the idea that the offending official has to give a justification or apology press conference later in the week. Guns always owned up to it when he made mistakes; we should all be more like that.
One of the nuances of this situation in particular is that the french open press kind of has a history of being racist jerks, so she didn’t want to put up with that. Beyond that though, the crappy thing here is that osaka even said being fined was okay with her, then the grand slam committee decided to try and browbeat her with forfeitures. She withdrew and it worked, hence them turning around and going “Well hey let’s not do anything hasty, we’ll hear what you have to say.” This was such a dumb move and good for Osaka for calling their bluff, now they look like idiots for forcing their best women’s player from a premier tournament.
Whether someone thinks that athletes should be beholden to these pressers or not, one thing I would hope everyone can agree on is that in no world should a player of any sport be threatened with MISSING GAMES for not going to something as meaningless as a press conference. Fines, sure. But when one of your best players doesn’t feel taken care of and feels the need to not participate in the sport because of this nonsense, you have a problem on both a moral and business level.
no. no, we don’t need press conferences. we don’t need the press, they’re a dinosaur that needs a comet.
Let’s play along with this line of thinking. So all the press die. Hurray. Ignoring the political landmines this creates to a democratic society for the moment… how exactly do you plan to get us sports news, if all the sports news-writer-uppers are dead?
My least favorite thing is when they interview a player right after a big win, when the whole team and coaching staff is going nuts on the field/court and the media person concludes the interview by saying “now go celebrate with your team.” Aaaaaaah, can’t stand it.
(just want one player to be like “no, you’re not the boss of me” and then just walk out of the stadium with an expressionless face)