🎪 If you're going to cover the circus

Last week, the rag that is America’s oldest continuously published newspaper¹ ran a story featuring photographs of an NFL head coach and an NFL reporter at an Arizona hotel.

One photo showed Patriots coach Mike Vrabel hugging Dianna Russini of The Athletic. Another captured them facing one another, holding hands, fingers interlaced. There were also photographs in the pool and the hot tub.

(Audible gasp)

The pictures made it look like this was a romantic getaway, and it has become something of a sex scandal.

There are Eagles fans convinced this proves Russini has been promoting an A.J. Brown trade because Vrabel’s Patriots would be a likely destination.

Others are fixated on the question of infidelity as Vrabel and Russini are married, but to other people.

Then there’s the contingent of loathsome dolts who seem to think this story confirms all the terrible tropes about unethical female reporters.

But for all the attention paid to the gender dynamics, the biggest issue, in my opinion, is the increasingly fuzzy ethics of not just Russini, but the entire tier of scoop-oriented insiders to which she belongs.

We’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s get you caught up to the Mariners.

Each Friday, I join Ian Furness on KJR 93.3 FM at 1:30 p.m.

This past week, we spoke just after the bat on Ichiro’s statue broke during its unveiling.

Ian proclaimed it as an omen of sorts. The Mariners, who’d managed exactly three runs total over their three previous games, were going to come out swinging.

They did, scoring a season-high nine runs on Friday.

They followed it up with eight runs on Saturday, winning with J.P. Crawford’s bases-loaded single in the ninth. Seattle won 6-1 on Sunday, clinching their first victory in a series this season with the finale of the four-game series with the Astros set for Monday afternoon.

The Mariners have scored 23 runs in the three games they’ve played since the bat on the Ichiro statue was broken. They’d managed just 18 in the previous nine games combined.

Julio Rodriguez has gone 5-for-13 against Houston, including a home run and a double on Saturday. Those were his first two extra-base hits of the season.

The Astros pitching has reached a crisis point because its starters are getting knocked around and knocked out of games early.

Tatsuya Imai, who started Friday’s game for Houston, walked four, recording just one out before he was removed.

Cody Bolton, the Astros starter on Sunday, failed to get an out in the second before he was replaced.

In the three games against the Mariners, Houston’s starting pitchers have thrown a combined 5.2 innings compared to 18.1 for the pen.

There are other things you’re generally forbidden from doing as a reporter, too:

The whole idea is that you, as a reporter, are not supposed to have a personal stake in a story you’re covering. For example, business reporters are often restricted from making any personal stock transactions involving the companies they cover.

But over the past 20 years, a tier of reporters has emerged who operate more like independent information brokers than conventional reporters.

This is the league insider.

Guys like Adam Schefter and Shams Charania, who are known for being at the front of the line when it comes to reporting big transactions in the leagues they cover. Schefter covers the NFL for ESPN, and Charania the NBA.

They report signings and trades before they are officially announced. Their ability to do this stems from the personal relationships they have with their sources.

People assume these sources are agents who represent players, and sometimes they are. But the most valuable sources in pro sports are the league coaches and/or executives who have a favorite person they feed information to.

How you cultivate these sources is the dark art of this entire enterprise.

In 2022, the Washington Post reported that Schefter was known to spend thousands of dollars on Christmas gifts for his sources, which the paper said numbered 150. Mark Cuban has referred to Shams as “my guy.”

I’m not going to tell you this is wrong in and of itself. Part of being a reporter is building trust with the people inside the institutions you are covering. The flip side of that is you can see how a reporter could preserve or deepen a relationship by providing more favorable characterizations of a source, or even withholding unflattering information to keep the source from looking bad.

If Russini was having an intimate relationship with Vrabel, it was a clear violation of the ethical standards of the profession. Even if the pictures captured the full extent of their physical interaction, the behavior wasn’t appropriate in my opinion.

But there are a lot of things that insiders do that I don’t think are appropriate.

The minute you start shaping your stories or your reports in a way that benefits your sources, you’re not being objective. You’re currying favor with someone, presumably so they’ll remain inclined to give you information.

Sometimes, this is fairly obvious. Jordan Schultz doesn’t do much to hide his approach.

Other times, it’s a little less clear.

Should FOX’s Jay Glazer be training NFL players in the offseason? How about staging a day-drinking session with coaches and executives at the most recent owner’s meetings.

Now it’s possible these personal relationships never get in the way of a reporter’s professional responsibilities.

But if you know where to look, you can see specific instances in which insiders defer or even cater to sources. I have something of a running list for one particular reporter:

Here’s another one: On the day the draft was to begin in 2021, Schefter reported that Aaron Rodgers was unhappy in Green Bay and wanted a trade.

The timing struck many as odd.

Mike Silver’s (excellent) book “The Why Is Everything” documents that this report caused a rift between Green Bay’s coach Matt LaFleur and San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan, who’d been very close.

Why?

Well, Mike Shanahan – Kyle’s father – is considered one of Schefter’s core sources. LaFleur felt the timing of Schefter’s report was an attempt to put pressure on the Packers to trade Rodgers, presumably to San Francisco, which held the No. 3 overall pick.

The Packers held onto Rodgers, the 49ers drafted Trey Lance, but it was some time before LaFleur started talking to Shanahan again.

The following week, Schefter explained the timing of his report during his appearance on Dan Patrick’s radio show:

Did Schefter do anything wrong?

Depends on your perspective.

Rodgers was unhappy, so Schefter wasn’t wrong per se.

But the timing of Schefter’s report and the involvement of a Shanahan sure makes me wonder whether there was a finger on the scale. Reporting that Rodgers was unhappy in Green Bay certainly didn’t hurt the 49ers’ chances to acquire Rodgers, and I don’t think reporters should let themselves get used like a cat’s paw.

Now I want to acknowledge that this story about Schefter is an awful long way from someone (potentially) having an intimate relationship with a source.

I’m not saying they’re equivalent because they’re not.

What I am saying is that the relationships that fuel the insider economy are often personal. The possibility of an intimate affair is a difference in degree rather than in kind.

The insider economy depends on access to sources. Some reporters create personal relationships to achieve and then maintain that access.

I’m not saying everyone who holds one of these jobs operates this way. I’m not saying most of them do. I am saying that the nature of the job and the emphasis on obtaining information creates a situation that is ripe for ethical breaches.

Some people aren’t going to get past the (possible) sex, though.

That’s too bad because there’s a lot more to this story.