The Cowardice of Political Incuriosity

On Sunday, Dan Duggan, The Athletic’s beat reporter for the New York Giants, penned a column to discuss the back-and-forth locker room drama surrounding quarterback Jaxson Dart’s decision to appear at a Trump rally and teammate Abdul Carter’s public objection.

Duggan’s column reflected a poison that has become an insidious part of sportswriting and has been for decades.

He led his column with three paragraphs of posturing about how he doesn’t care — or even know about — politics.

This is an abdication of one’s responsibilities as a citizen and as a sportswriter.

Initially, it might seem like his pure commitment to intentional ignorance is a retreat into being shielded from the consequences of weighty decision-making or public accountability. And it may very well be.

But more than that, it’s arrogance.

Counterintuitively, this kind of signaling is often meant to convey seriousness and intelligence; in this construction, politics is theater and frivolity. It is no different than looking down on people for liking pop music or reality television.

The fact that this is in service to something inarguably more frivolous than politics — sports — is hilarious.

Nevertheless, there has been some discussion speculating that Duggan is “lying” about this stance of his and that he’s secretly a Trump supporter. I haven’t seen any evidence of that throughout his writing, even when sensitive topics like Colin Kaepernick come up, and I have no reason to think he isn’t writing what he believes to be true of himself.

The problem is that a political orientation of apathy prioritizes the status quo, an ultimately conservative instinct. While the current regime of conservative politics does more than maintain the system as-is — there’s a genuine attempt at rollback and move towards an imagined historical ideal — apathy reinforces power.

It is easy to ignore politics as a middle-class cis white man. It is more difficult for my trans friends, who are fighting for their lives every day for access to health care. It is tough to ignore politics when one has to choose between medication and food or when underlying systemic factors impact auto loans, mortgages, education, access to hospitals, law enforcement and hiring.

Duggan is enjoying the luxury not to care.

This column engages in what is essentially defensive writing. That itself is not a huge criticism; I often engage in defensive writing — pre-empting common criticisms or responses — in my opinion-forward columns. He wants to prevent readers from accusing him of writing the issue with bias that would otherwise cloud his analysis of the Giants locker room.

The issue is that the defensive argumentation has stolen the focus of the piece and disrupted the flow of the writing. It’s a slog to read, and there’s no momentum heading into the parts he wants to discuss. Three paragraphs of defense before ever hitting a point he actually wants to make.

Ostensibly, the intent of the piece was to discuss the locker room impact of having “big personalities” — a ridiculous framing — on one team. Instead, the reader comments are (or were, before moderation) primarily about Duggan’s stated non-stance. Was this the goal?

The rest of the piece is thin, but it’s not an entirely poor recap of the issues the Giants locker room might face with a roster prone to inviting in non-football news stories. It threads together unrelated news items and brings them into a cohesive conclusion that, while somewhat unremarkable, is still functionally within the scope of Duggan’s job.

Everyone who has written for the Athletic, me included, has written a piece that does this, and it would be ridiculous of me to exempt myself from the critique of a shallow, but reasonably well-constructed piece that would otherwise not make many waves when bringing together a useful set of shared concerns.

But there’s a reason this piece drew over 1,000 comments at The Athletic, despite there being several other pieces one could comment on for this event that have been directly fed to Giants fans. The comments are not about the common factors linking Carter, Dart, Malik Nabers and Cam Skattebo.

The moral cowardice of refusing to take a stance aside, this makes Dan a much less effective sports reporter. Without an understanding of why Dart took the risk of making a public stance or why a Black Muslim man might object to Dart’s support for a racist, Duggan can only report on the surface-level impact of these kinds of things.

Indeed, his third paragraph made it clear he didn’t expect to have to address this at all.

One is not a better journalist in any arena — sports, arts & entertainment, science, religion, lifestyle, business, cooking or even video games coverage — because one ignores the institutions that impact all of these systems in obvious and non-obvious ways.

Can one cover the games industry without talking about the spike in RAM prices? Can one discuss the types of food Americans eat without learning about agricultural subsidies? How are the costs of products impacted by oil prices and war in the Persian Gulf? How do tariffs impact fashion? Can we have a conversation about religion in the news while ignoring the Pope’s stance on American intervention? Can we do science journalism without understanding the extraordinary blow to science funding we’ve experienced? How can we discuss any entertainment at all if we don’t talk about the people who produce it?

These are all political questions, and while coverage of these newspaper sections can be done without this knowledge, one is, inarguably, a worse journalist without knowing about these things.

With the New York Giants specifically, anyone with any level of political insight would be able to detect that there was some possibility that Dart’s endorsement could cause strife in the locker room. There’d been endless discussion about the volatility of the first Trump election inside NFL locker rooms, with some banning discussion of the election because of how explosive it could become.

Without serious political interrogation, Duggan doesn’t have the ability to discern why players might find it objectionable or how they might feel the need to violate established norms of keeping “locker room issues” inside the locker room and address things publicly — outside of calling Carter a “big personality” or saying they have “political disagreements.”

This flattening of distinctions does not serve readers, despite Duggan’s suggestion that his ignorance benefits those wanting to learn more about the Giants. Why would a Black Muslim man feel that objecting to Trump was important enough to risk strife in a locker room?