Paul Sullivan Chicago Tribune column on sports media as pawns

Meh.

You can argue that everyone is a pawn for something or someone.

The relationship between sports leagues / teams and media outlets / reporters is a simple one.

Put aside the pandemic and the mess that zoom interviews with teams completely controlling access has created for the time being.

The leagues need healthy fan interest in order to sell tickets, garner viewers (which translates into TV contracts) and sell licensed gear.

Kyrie Irving may not understand his role in all of this, and may never get it, and many of the individual reporters may not understand the dynamic they are part of. But the chess game is way more complicated than one side controlling the board and using the other as pawns.

The outlets those reporters work for want sports coverage to attract readers who want it, which those outlets hope to monetize via subscriptions or ads.

The leagues want that sports coverage to keep fans engaged, so they can sell tickets and get TV contracts and sell jerseys.

The players, whether they get it or not, should want that coverage, because it's what keeps their salaries going up.

Within that dynamic, of course teams would like to control how their team gets covered, but that doesn't mean that they are completely in control and the media is their pawn, because that push-pull dynamic exists within what is a largely symbiotic relationship.

Some teams lose sight of that, often in the heat of a moment over something written or said about a player or team, and many of the players, such as Kyrie Irving are clueless, but Adam Silver and most of the owners understand that there is a symbiosis there that works to their benefit too.