Matt Calkins spent eleven years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times. On Thursday he quit, and the reason he quit is the most Seattle thing that has ever happened.
He wrote a column. The paper would not run it.
The column came out of the July 28 game between the Storm and the Fever at Climate Pledge Arena, where a group had gathered beforehand to thank Fever guard Sophie Cunningham for defending female-only sports. Calkins did what a reporter does. He talked to people. He interviewed a sixteen year old athlete named Ahnaleigh Wilson, who was holding a sign thanking Cunningham, and who told him plainly that she does not hate anyone. His thesis was that you can support separating male and female athletics without being a bigot, and that everyone should probably stop hurling that word around.
You already know what happened at that game, because it made national news. A Storm co-owner confronted Wilson and another sixteen year old, called them a word we will not print, and informed them they were un-Christian. One of the girls cried and put her sign away. The team apologized. The WNBA suspended the co-owner for five home games and fined her.
So to review: a nationally covered incident, at a Seattle arena, involving a Seattle team, whose Seattle owner was disciplined by her league, reported by a Seattle columnist for the Seattle newspaper.
The Seattle Times passed.
Now, the reason they gave. This is the part you want to read twice. Calkins says he was eventually told the column would not run because he had not given sufficient advance notice that he was working on it.
Insufficient notice. That was the finding.
He had filed it, told his editor there was no rush, and then watched the piece work its way up through multiple editors to the top of the newsroom over the course of several days. Which is, as he pointed out, not what happens when the problem is paperwork. If a column dies over process, it dies in about four minutes. It does not get a committee. Nobody escalates a scheduling issue to senior leadership and sits on it for the better part of a week.
He resigned on the spot, which is the correct response and also, frankly, an underrated career move.
And it turns out this was the third time. The Times previously killed a column of his questioning whether the US Women's National Team pay dispute was actually sex discrimination, given that the men and women were operating under separately negotiated contracts. That is a legitimate and answerable question, and asking it is roughly the entire job description. They also killed one about cancel culture in sports.
Calkins named the common thread himself. Each piece challenged prevailing newsroom narratives.
Here is what should bother anyone who cares about newspapers, including people who disagree with Calkins entirely. A columnist is not a beat reporter. The paper does not hire a columnist to relay scores. It hires him to argue, to poke at assumptions, to say the thing the room has decided not to say. That is the product. A newspaper that employs a columnist and then removes every column that might generate an argument has not protected its readers from anything. It has simply purchased an expensive man to agree with it.
Calkins, for his part, went out gracious. He said he enjoyed his time there, that the talent is immense, that he holds nothing against anyone. Then he explained that he no longer believed he could do his job properly.
He is being too polite about it. The Seattle Times did not decide he was wrong. It decided the argument was not worth having, which is a considerably worse thing for a newspaper to decide.
Somewhere in that building is a column about two teenage girls who got screamed at for holding a sign. It has been reviewed by everyone. It will be read by no one.
- Article Source:
The Post Millennial
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