When Sportico hires new journalists, they’re given a set of ethics guidelines that include the following: “Don’t own any individual stocks of companies that we cover. Don’t invest in companies that operate in industries we cover.”
It’s a common guardrail for reporters, designed to avoid conscious and unconscious bias, but also any appearance of bias. I thought about those rules this week when Tom Brady ended a two-year negotiation process—first with Mark Davis, then with the NFL—to buy a 5% stake in the Las Vegas Raiders. The former quarterback is in year one of a decade-long $375 million deal to be Fox Sports’ lead NFL analyst and will continue with that role unchanged. In the rare instance that his crew might call a Raiders game, Brady will be in the booth.
I don’t think of Brady as a journalist, and as such, certainly wouldn’t hold him to the same standards of any of my peers. I asked a few different media ethics experts this week, and they agreed.
“Very few sports broadcasters are journalists. Brady absolutely is not one of those few,” John Watson, an associate journalism professor at American University, said in an email. “The overwhelming bulk of them are simply entertainers.”
“I don’t see Brady as a journalist,” Susan Keith, a professor in Rutgers’ Department of Journalism and Media Studies, said in an email. “In analyzing games in real time, he is doing something that a sports journalist with a deep knowledge of the NFL and broadcast training might do (without a veteran former player’s perspective). But just providing that analysis doesn’t make one a journalist.”
Brady’s Raiders stake, however, does present other challenges for his new day job. As part of the long-running process, Brady agreed in August to a handful of restrictions that set him apart from other TV analysts, including others in the Fox booth. He is not permitted to attend broadcast production meetings and may not have access to team facilities, players, coaches or other franchise personnel. He also must adhere to league bylaws about public criticism of officials and other clubs.
Those are meaningful limits. TV analysts are constantly sharing knowledge that comes from observing practices and week-of meetings with coaches and players. Those conversations are a delicate dance of on-the-record and off-the-record context about roster usage, player health, play calling and game strategy. “It’s a game within a game,” NBC’s Cris Collinsworth told the New York Times in 2011.
Part of a good analyst’s job is learning how to 1) glean information from those meetings, and 2) disseminate that info to viewers over the course of a game. Brady’s colleagues have that access; he does not.
How important is that access? A Fox rep declined to comment, but the rules have been in place all season and Brady’s first year seems to be going fine. Also, the outsider approach hasn’t appeared to impact fellow ex-quarterbacks Eli and Peyton Manning, whose alt casts have grown a following among many NFL fans.
Plus, bias (and perceived bias) is an inherent part of broadcasting nowadays. There’s probably a dozen fan bases that believe Collinsworth is biased against their team, and he’s near the end of his fourth decade calling games.
“Sports broadcasters routinely show their biases and favoritism because that is part of what they are paid and required to deliver,” Watson said.
We may never know how much the restrictions will impact Brady’s on-air product. I suspect he will own this Raiders stake long after his broadcast days are over, and while on-air talent is now paid more than most of the stars they cover, their actual broadcast abilities seem to be a small part of why they’re there. As my colleague Anthony Crupi has written many times, the NFL’s strong ratings indicate fans don’t really care who is calling games.
Tom Brady doesn’t need to be the Tom Brady of broadcasting—people will still tune in.