the WNBA players' unprecedented stand against 'biased' reporting
and why the statement addressing reporting from USA TODAY's Christine Brennan was about more than just one incident
Thanks for being here! Below, a deep dive into the women’s basketball reporting that USA TODAY’s Christine Brennan has published this season, which prompted a response from the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association. A disclaimer that this is not intended as an attack on Brennan personally, and, as you will see below, I have tried to directly address this matter with Brennan in the past and she responded by blocking me. Now that other publications are weighing in on the issue, I felt it was appropriate—and important—to ensure that all the context was made clear.
I am a full-time freelance sports writer. I decided to make this post free because I think it’s important, but a lot of hours of research went into it. Paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to dedicate more time to this work. You can upgrade here:
Last Friday, the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA), the WNBA players’ union, put out a strong statement on social media. It was directed at one journalist, USA TODAY’s Christine Brennan, and was signed by WNBPA Executive Director Terri Jackson “on behalf of the 144” members of the league.
“To unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan,” it began.
“You are not fooling anyone. That so-called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating into a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure. Instead of demonstrating the cornerstones of journalism ethics like integrity, objectivity, and a fundamental commitment to truth, you have chosen to be indecent and downright insincere.”
The interview in question was an exchange that Brennan had posted on her X account, in which she had asked Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington about a play that occurred in Game 1 of the first round of the playoffs between Carrington and the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark. That play, in which Carrington’s finger accidentally poked Clark in the eye while going for the ball, dominated headlines following the game (I wrote more about that coverage here).
“When you went and kind of swatted at Caitlin, did you intend to hit her in the eye?” Brennan asked Carrington. Carrington responded that it was not intentional and, in the moment, didn’t even realize she had hit Clark.
Brennan followed up by asking if Carrington and her Sun teammate Marina Mabrey laughed about Clark getting hit later in the game. Carrington said no and, “I just told you that I didn’t even know I hit her.” The moment that Brennan is referring to in which she thought Carrington and Mabrey were laughing about Clark getting hit in the eye was actually the players doing a Carmelo Anthony “three to the dome” three-point celebration, something that anyone reporting on basketball should probably know.
The clip of the interview garnered a lot of criticism on X from WNBA players, fans, and members of the media. The WNBPA statement did not mince words about how the players felt about Brennan’s coverage.
“You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued to you,” their statement continued. “And you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with the members of this union or any other athlete in sport.” They went on:
“We call on USA Today Network to review its Principles of Ethical Conduct for Newsrooms and address what we believe is a violation of several core principles, including seeking and reporting the truth.
USA Today Sports should explain why a reporter with clear bias and ulterior motives was assigned to cover the league. We also urge the league to review its policies and take measures to prevent such issues, protecting the integrity of the game and its players.”
In response, USA TODAY defended Brennan, with Executive Sports Editor Roxanna Scott signing a statement of her own. “Journalists ask questions and seek truth,” Scott’s statement read. “We reject the notion that the interview perpetuated any narrative other than to get the player’s perspective directly. Christine Brennan is well regarded as an advocate for women and athletes, but first and foremost, she’s a journalist.” (Chicago Sky player Brianna Turner called this statement “an example of gaslighting”.)
Both publicly and privately, sports journalists have been discussing amongst themselves what they think about the unprecedented situation, in which the players of a league call out an individual journalist by name and ask for her credentials to be revoked.
"I've never seen a statement like the one the WNBPA's put out,”
, the sports journalism professor behind the newsletter, told me. “Mainly, I can't remember another time a player's union, league, or any entity called out a specific reporter by name in a statement. That's pretty unprecedented.”On Monday, CNN aired a segment with Jake Tapper that portrayed the players’ union as “lashing out” at Brennan over one question. In addition, Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones published a column addressing the controversy. Poynter is “a nonprofit media institute and newsroom that provides fact-checking, media literacy and journalism ethics training to citizens and journalists in service to democracy” and is one of the few publications left that still provides media criticism and commentary.
While Jones acknowledged that the racist coverage that WNBA players have had to endure all season likely contributed to their sensitivity to Brennan’s line of questioning, he concluded that the players’ statement regarding Brennan “was out of line.” He understood the WNBPA’s desire to protect the players, but said “they chose the wrong target and the wrong message.”
This is where I must now cite what I feel is irresponsible coverage on the part of Poynter and CNN. Because if the WNBPA’s statement was in response to this single incident, I could understand it being seen as extreme and potentially uncalled for. But what Jones and Tapper seem to have failed to realize is that the WNBPA statement was likely in response to a season-long pattern of egregious and biased reporting on Brennan’s behalf. The interview with Carrington following the playoff game against the Fever may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but Brennan has spent the entire WNBA season seemingly pushing a narrative that Caitlin Clark is not only the savior of the WNBA, but that the other players are envious of her and treating her unfairly.
I want to get a few things out of the way before I continue: the first is that Brennan has long been a respected figure in the field of sports journalism. According to her website, she was the first female sports reporter for the Miami Herald in 1981, the first woman at the Washington Post on the Washington Commanders beat in 1985, and the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media in 1988. She also won the 2020 Red Smith Award, presented annually by the Associated Press Sports Editors to a person who has made “major contributions to sports journalism.” I am aware that Brennan has been in this industry since before I was born and I have always had a lot of respect for what she has accomplished in her career.
The other thing that is important context here is that Brennan works as a columnist for USA TODAY, which means that she gets to share her opinion much more openly than if she were doing straight reporting. That matters, and means that her work will usually have a pointed “take.”
Now, let’s look at this column from April 15:
This column was published before the WNBA season even began. Brennan’s career has spanned many decades and she has covered a variety of sports, including the Olympics. However, it doesn’t appear to me that women’s basketball—NCAA or WNBA—has ever been a main part of her beat prior to this season. She has covered the sport during Olympic years, as part of her coverage of the Games. The premise of the April 15th column is that WNBA players should be grateful for Clark—who hasn’t even played in the W yet at this point—because she is going to save their fledgling league, so why are these players being so mean about her?
Reader, the players were never being mean about Clark. They were simply noting things like the fact that most rookies have an adjustment period when they make it to the W, or their personal belief that you can’t be considered one of the greatest women’s basketball players of all time without a national championship. Pretty normal stuff!
But the most eyebrow-raising part of the April 15th column was when Brennan wrote about trying to ask New York Liberty forward and two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart if she really thought Clark needed a NCAA championship to be considered one of the greats (for reference, Stewart won the national championship all four of her years playing for UConn).
“[Stewart’s] answer [that Clark needed a NCAA championship to be considered one of the greats] was downright strange, as if she didn’t want to acknowledge that this young woman, more than seven years her junior, was changing everything about how the nation looks at her sport,” Brennan wrote. “But I was intrigued, so, for the past week, I tried to find out what was going on. I asked Stewart’s agent, Lindsay Colas, several times if I could speak to Stewart, with no luck. Finally, at Colas’ suggestion, I texted two questions for her to send to Stewart, who Colas said was out of the country.”
Ok, are you all ready for the questions she texted Stewart? Because I’m not sure you’re ready for the questions. Like, you have to see these questions to believe they’re real and I can’t believe they were not only published openly in this column as if there was nothing wrong with them, but that an editor saw this line of questioning from Brennan and thought “nothing to see here!”
My questions:
1. Knowing the incredible college records and unprecedented historic impact Caitlin Clark has had on women’s basketball, do you regret your comment about her having to win a title to be “one of the greats?" It wasn’t to be the GOAT. It was “one of the greats,” which could encompass dozens of people. Even hundreds.
2. Had you gone to Syracuse or another school like that, like an Iowa, rather than UConn with so many future WNBA players as teammates, would you have been able to take that team to two consecutive NCAA finals?
These are absolutely pushing an agenda! She is essentially trying to browbeat Stewart into recanting her answer, as if Stewart, a league veteran and one of the greatest women’s basketball players of all-time, doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Let’s see what she was up to in June.
But let’s continue, shall we? Here’s a column from August 9:
Brennan spends the entirety of this column talking about how Clark was robbed of her spot on the U.S. Women’s National Basketball Team (the team that brought home the country’s eighth straight Olympic gold medal at the Paris Games this summer)1. Brennan went on a whole mini press tour complaining about Clark not being selected for the roster, to the point that USWNT coach Cheryl Reeve felt compelled to say, essentially, that she didn’t give a rat’s ass what Brennan thought about the decision (and yes, Brennan wrote a column about that, too).
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Now, if you thought that was all, you’d be wrong! Let’s look at Brennan’s most recent WNBA columns:
Are you sensing a pattern? Because I’m sensing a pattern. Go check out her X timeline and look at how many of her WNBA tweets are in defense of Clark, at the expense of Black players who face Clark, or only about Clark (spoiler: basically all of them). Since January of this year, I was able to find 18 columns from Brennan about women’s basketball. All but one of them were about Clark, with the exception being a column about whether Diana Taurasi’s injury could affect the Olympic squad—a column which she used to advocate for Clark to replace Taurasi on the roster. Even when she wasn’t writing about women’s basketball, she somehow found a way to write about Clark. Take this column from April 10:
Wait—have I mentioned yet that Brennan is writing a book about Clark? “With no book proposal, which has never happened before with any of my seven books, just a conversation, [Scribner] bought the Caitlin Clark book,” she told the Sports Illustrated “Fast Break” podcast last week. “It's unauthorized, in a sense, that I am not working with Caitlin on it. It's not ‘as told to,’ and it's a journalist's view, my view. There will be many, many interviews. I'm a journalist, and I'm going to ask a lot of questions. I'm so honored. I feel like a lifetime of work has led to this, to tell the story accurately.”
And did you know that Brennan is using her credentials at games to get interviews for her book, including during press conferences and media scrums? And that the questions she’s asking there—which again, should not be being asked in that setting—are also incredibly leading? And that a bunch of Black sports media professors and journalists have recently shared that she requested to interview them for her book and they turned her down when she refused to engage in a conversation about why her coverage is biased and harmful? And if all of this is what we have seen publicly, imagine the kinds of questions and media requests the players and their representatives and teams have faced from her privately.
To summarize: Brennan has spent the entire women’s basketball season writing exclusively about Caitlin Clark to the exclusion of the other 143 players (over 70% of whom are Black), dragging anyone who doesn’t spend enough time kissing the ground that Clark walks on, painting Clark as a victim of the other 143 players in the WNBA (again, over 70% of whom are Black), and blocking anyone who dares to criticize her coverage or call her in about it. She may very well be writing a book on Clark but in her role at USA TODAY, she covers national and international sports—so it’s not like she’s assigned to just the Fever beat (and even if she were, there are 11 other players on the Fever’s roster). This is an editorial issue, too; Brennan’s editors should have noticed either her bias or her hyperfocus and encouraged her to diversify (this is where it might be worth noting that USA TODAY Executive Sports Editor Roxanna Scott’s alma mater is… University of Iowa, the same as Clark).
It’s clear to me that the WNBPA statement was about Brennan’s behavior over the course of the entire season and not just about that one exchange with Carrington. To paint it as such is irresponsible and shows a lack of proper research into the situation. I think it’s perfectly fair for our profession to discuss the PA’s statement and the kind of precedent it sets—but in order to do so, we need to take a look at the whole picture.
The statement also potentially demonstrates a shift towards players trying to reclaim the narrative about themselves and their league. “Without getting into who's right and who's wrong here, I think what this [statement] speaks to is the level of player empowerment in the WNBA,” Moritz says. “Through the growth of digital and social media platforms. players, unions, and leagues are able to connect with fans and tell their stories without needing independent media. It is an enormous shift in the traditional power dynamic between the media and athletes, and that's one of primary changes that independent sports media is facing in the digital age.”
In other words: as journalists, we need to be accountable for the work we put into the world and be ready to deal with the consequences and fallout of our words—good and bad. Someone with Brennan’s platform and reputation has a real impact and ability to shape the narrative about the sports she covers. She is obviously not the only journalist who is guilty of pushing a narrative that centers Clark (I’d argue that Outkick is another outlet whose credentials should be questioned or revoked), but she is one of the highest profile and most well-respected members of the media doing so. There is a direct line to the columns that Brennan publishes and the racist, misogynist, harmful coverage that the league has gotten this season, and the harassment and threats of violence that players have faced as a result of that narrative.
Covering a league like the WNBA is not the same as covering a sport like figure skating or gymnastics or women’s hockey. Every sport has its own culture, context, history—all of that is necessary to understand in order to cover it well. As a white person covering a predominantly Black league, you have to understand your positionality. You have to be humble. You have to be willing to learn and admit when you're wrong. You have to know which stories are yours to tell and which you should leave to someone else. The same goes for if you are a straight person covering a league with a large queer culture, etc.
I have definitely gotten things wrong in the past. There are things I would do differently if I could do them again. But if you can't grow and evolve with the sports you cover, those sports will outgrow you.
To go back to USA TODAY’s defense of Brennan, Scott said that a journalist’s job is to “ask questions and seek truth” and that the publication’s “mission is to report in an unbiased manner.” I would absolutely agree that a journalist's job is to ask hard questions and it is not to be an advocate or a cheerleader or a PR mouthpiece. But the “hard” questions have to be put into the proper context and you have to know where your own biases may be coming in. Ask a colleague, get a gut check.
Having a platform and being a journalist comes with a great deal of responsibility. It requires understanding systems of power and oppression. We should always be punching up. If my work is harming the most marginalized or powerless of my sources, I have failed at my job. And no matter how long I’m in this work, I hope I never get to a place where I think I have nothing left to learn.
Full disclosure: Brennan blocked me on X after I tried to offer a call-in regarding this coverage.
Howard Bryant predicted this would happen on a podcast with Bomani Jones. He was describing female reporters like Brennan who have been in this business so long see Clark as their way of cashing out. Who knew he was talking about Brennan
Gannett, which is the bottomest of the bottom-feeding vulture capital journalism models, ALWAYS does this when journalists are accused of bias or unethical behavior.