Well, we have a full-scale New York Times vs. NFL war
The NFL wasn’t happy with The New York Times, demanded a retraction of its story criticizing the NFL on how it handled the concussion issue, and The Times shot back in kind on Wednesday.
In other words, the most famous newspaper in the United States and the most powerful sports entity in the U.S. are now in a public war of words.
The NFL’s demand that The New York Times retract a story titled “N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry,” seemed like a fairly empty threat. The letter the NFL sent to The Times doesn’t really explain why The Times should retract a story other than that the NFL wasn’t happy with the story and the way it made the NFL look. That’s not good reason for a retraction, and that’s what The Times told the NFL in a letter on Wednesday, which it tweeted out from its sports section’s account.
The letter says in a number of ways that the NFL isn’t disputing The Times’ facts, it’s just saying it didn’t like the story (and, clearly, the league was angry about the comparison to the tobacco industry and has glommed onto that part of the article) and that’s not a reason for retraction. It’s pretty much an annoyed Journalism 101 lecture.
“As you know, The Times has a policy of correcting factual errors as promptly as possible,” the letter said. “I have reviewed your letter with our editors and reporters, and nowhere does your letter identify any factual error that we have made in our reporting on the ties between the NFL and the tobacco industry.”
The Times even shoots back at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, which drafted the retraction request letter on behalf of the NFL:
“While your earlier letter to The Times called the tobacco industry “perhaps the most odious industry in American history,” you somehow fail to mention in either letter that it was your firm that represented Philip Morris in that RICO case.”
Yep, the gloves are off.
The NFL, like most powerful and rich companies, is used to getting its way in many instances. Maybe it expected the same here. However, the Times wasn’t going to roll over for the mighty NFL.
Or maybe the NFL is fine with how all this played out. As Awful Announing’s Ty Schalter wrote, this was the first salvo in what seems to be a changing media strategy for the NFL. If its reaction to The New York Times is an indication of things to come, the NFL plans to aggressively fight stories that don’t reflect well on the league. The NFL has never really publicly lashed out like this at media outlets in the past, at least not with the public grandstanding it employed with The Times’ story. (As many people have pointed out, the NFL didn’t really get this mad when there were deflate-gate stories that it knew had incorrect facts.) Even though the NFL seemed to be threatening to sue if there was no retraction, it seemed implausible that the league would want to go to court for a public fight that centers around its strategies in dealing with the concussion crisis.
But through its public show, the NFL did seemingly send a message for the future. The New York Times sent one right back.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
