Adam Schefter is exceptionally good at his job, and this job that he is exceptionally good at has become exceptionally lucrative over the past fifteen years. In fact, it’s so lucrative that Schefter now makes more than most NFL head coaches.
Wild isn’t it? A reporter covering the NFL makes more than three-quarters of the league’s head coaches if the report of Schefter’s salary is correct.
Except Schefter is not a reporter. Not in the way the profession is taught in American colleges nor the way it is supposed to be practiced in contemporary American newsrooms. In fact, any attempt to evaluate Schefter according to an ideal of objective and unbiased journalism will produce a distorted version of what it is that Schefter does. I reached this conclusion after reading Ben Strauss’s very thorough, very informative profile on Schefter which was published in the Washington Post this week.
The story describes the influence and affluence Schefter has achieved while covering the NFL and contrasts it with the very public missteps he has made over the past twelve months. Schefter is rendered as a hard-charging and well-connected journalist who has occasionally pushed too hard, too fast, but this assumes that he is operating in the good faith that is expected of journalists in this country. This assumption gives Schefter entirely too much credit.
Schefter exists in the gray space of modern media that belongs to the insiders. The scoopsters. The access merchants who are essentially well-connected eavesdroppers. He is not a reporter so much as an information broker whose value comes from his ability to get football news to his audience first. His ability to get this information first comes from his proximity to Powerful Football People. His proximity to Powerful Football People comes from the information he has, which means that Schefter is not prone to conflicts of interest so much as he is embedded in them. He’s torn between a reporter’s obligation to tell the audience the truth as best he can and keeping himself in the good graces of the Powerful Football People who are talking to him.
A reporter should be independent from the people and companies he’s covering. There should be a level of transparency. There should be a desire to provide an accurate description of the entirety of a situation. Schefter’s ability to do these things is undermined by his need to stay close to the people who provide him with information, but the real problems with his approach emerge when he tackles a story more complex than Player X is signing with Team Y.
I’ve written about a number of these incidents. In October, it was his emails to the Washington president. Last November, I wrote about his report on Dalvin Cook. In March, I stopped following him on Twitter after he presented the failure of a Texas grand jury to indict Watson as a vindication of the quarterback.
Back then, I was viewing Schefter as a reporter, though. I know better than that now because the one common thread in Schefter’s missteps has been that those missteps invariably benefit those Powerful Football People that Schefter counts on for information. It’s what happened in his reporting on Cook. It’s what happened in his characterization of the criminal accusations against Watson.
His coverage of the Washington football club is particularly telling. Back in October, a 2011 email from Schefter to Bruce Allen, the team’s president, became public, showing Schefter had given Allen a chance to review an entire story written on the prospective agreement that would end the lockout then underway. Schefter went so far to address the team president as Mr. Editor. Then, last September, Schefter had Tara Snyder, the wife of Washington’s owner, on his podcast to “tell us her reaction to what the Snyder Family and the franchise endured over the last year.”
Stop and think about that for a second. This is a Washington franchise that is accused of what can only be described as the sexual exploitation of its cheerleaders and a workplace so toxic it is now subject to a congressional review. And eleven years ago – while all of this is going on – Schefter was giving the president of that team a sneak peak to suggest changes to his copy and after all of this mess was revealed Schefter then had the wife of the owner onto his podcast to talk about how hard it has been for her and her family. That’s not what a reporter does. Not a good one any way.
But documenting workplace harassment and forcing people in power to account for it are the kinds of stories that piss off the Powerful Football People, or at the very least make them leery of unguarded conversation. Digging into stories that cast a bad light on a franchise in particular or the pro-football industry in general would threaten Schefter’s access to the flow of information that makes him so valuable. He’s like a housebroken pet that knows which treats are for him, which food is to be left alone and knows that above all else he better not make a mess in the living room.
There was one quote from Schefter in the Washington Post profile that I found particularly telling: “I’ve never put out information thinking I would get something back in the future. If people want to work with me, great. If not, okay.”
Most people focused on the first sentence of that statement, believing it was dubious that Schefter never expects anything in return. What stuck out to me was the second sentence. “If people want to work with me …” It’s a phrase you would use when talking about a colleague or someone with whom there is a give and a take. A transactional relationship, which is exactly what Schefter has with the sources that he’s supposed to be covering.
He’s so good at it, that the parameters don’t even have to be spoken aloud or spelled out. He knows what can be reported and when without endangering a meaningful relationship. It’s the reason why Mike Shanahan called Bill Belichick to say that Schefter could be trusted and several years later Belichick informed Shanahan that he was right.
You may see that as a sign that two Super Bowl-winning coaches consider Schefter to be unfailingly fair. I see it as evidence that Schefter knows how to do his job according to their rules, and while that has become an extremely lucrative gig in today’s economy, the job should never be mistaken for being an objective reporter.
