This week has been especially interesting in Edmonton, not because of the hockey - because as far as that goes things have been pretty so-so - but because of the friction between mainstream media members who cover the Oilers and the blogging community that does the same job. Friction has always existed, in fact I firmly believe dissatisfaction with the MSM is one of the reasons Oiler blogs are so prevalent compared to other markets. It certainly isn’t that there’s a higher ratio of Mothers’ Basements to Sad and Lonely people in Edmonton (despite what the other side might say).
At the Center of it all is an interview that Dallas Eakins did with TSN analytics
that can be heard here. There is a section of the interview where Eakins talks about the difficulties faced by him when he hired Tyler Dellow (Mc79Hockey) who ran a very popular analytics website. Eakins was working outside the box hiring Dellow to assist him as the coach and you can imagine the pushback there would be in the organization. This is obviously not something that traditional hockey people have been open about even talking about, let alone actually trying at the NHL level. Eakins would no doubt face an uphill battle against the people signing his checks.
Except those weren’t the difficulties that Eakins talked about. His weren’t coming from the traditionalist sections of the Oilers, his were coming immediately from the people who were tasked with covering the Oilers in the media. Here is the offending quote:
...Bringing in Tyler was an interesting process on a number of fronts. Something that caught me off-guard. And the first thing that came up in hiring Tyler was we pushed hard for it, got it through, was the local reaction from the media. And it was interesting because we announced the hiring, immediately we had an email to our PR department asking the question "Is anyone from the organization going to talk about the hiring of this prick."
That was the quote that started a war. On one side are the people (mainly bloggers like myself) for whom this was the smoking gun when it came to the unprofessional manner in which several members of the media conducted themselves regarding Tyler Dellow specifically and to the rise of statistical analysis broadly. On the other side of this skirmish there have been established members of Edmonton’s sports media who have called the whole thing overblown and taken offense to having their integrity challenged.
As for the reporter in question who sent the email in the first place? His superiors were contacted by the Oilers organization after they received the communication. This was not a normal occurrence that is being blown out of proportions by outsiders who don’t understand the business. This blew up, first privately, because the hockey club thought one of the people covering the team was acting thoroughly unprofessionally.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Why should I care if some reporter called Tyler Dellow, who had a reputation as a prickly character, a nasty name? If it was a one off thing then you shouldn’t put too much stock into it. It was a bad decision, an error in judgment. When it becomes just another example of a way that the media is allowing their personal problems taint the way they cover their assignments then you should.
You should absolutely care if the person tasked with reporting fairly and accurately has a personal axe to grind with the people and topics he/she covers. Stories get written and become truth because we depend on journalists to provide us with the right information. We are supposed to be able to believe them when they report to us the things we cannot see for ourselves.
In the battle of Blogger vs MSM the biggest tool the traditional journalist has that 95% of bloggers does not is access. They are supposed to be our eyes and ears in places we ourselves cannot be. If somebody, or a group of people, are misusing the trust we as the public have put in them because they have that access in order to mislead or misguide us then it’s that trust that has been violated.
It might be something many Edmonton media members might scoff at, but it’s hard to put that trust back in them when they laugh off the suggestion one of their own (or more) have more than once tried to spin the truth to their own end.
Bottom line, you should absolutely care if the people tasked with keeping you informed are actively twisting the truth.
THE TEMPEST IN THE TEAPOT
This is the take of the Journal’s John MacKinnon. This is what it looks like when ranks close in to protect someone in Edmonton’s sports media.
It’s a master class in Spin that has been lauded by Mark Spector and Jim Matheson, the two ranking members of Edmonton’s chapter in the Professional Hockey Writer’s Association. It has been criticized harshly by
Greg Wyshynki and pretty much everybody else who actually knows enough of the truth to see past the lies. I also have some criticism of this piece.
The very first place the lengthy post goes is on the defensive of Mark Spector (Executive VP of the PHWA and Edmonton’s Chapter Chair). In reference to this tweet:
MacKinnon writes, “OK, this was a bit of a barbed remark, perhaps, but a throwaway line if ever there was one, and the reference to Dellow was very gentle. It was intended to amuse; it was harmless. Right?”
Sure. Harmless. Until you start combining that comment with all of the other verbal battles Spector had with Edmonton’s analytics consultant. I wonder most about why MacKinnon chose to reference the most benign run Mark Spector took at the Oilers employee when he could have easily referenced the article that Spector published the day Dellow was hired that Sportsnet subsequently took down from their site just minutes later because it too was unprofessional and inappropriate.
The anecdote MacKinnon chooses to open his post with is meant absolutely to portray “Dellow’s supporters” (read: bloggers and critical thinkers) as thin skinned over-reactors. Can you believe these people who would get so upset at a funny one-liner? He makes no attempt to explain how before and after Dellow was hired Mark Spector took offense with the lawyer-turned-analytics-consultant and accurately describe to his reader that history between them ran deeper than a funny tweet.
MacKinnon is disarming the reader here. Getting them on his side. He continues to mislead:
One self-appointed protector of Dellow whose handle is @blackbetty07 vaulted the boards, as it were, and acidly congratulated Spector for “growing a pair now that (Dellow) can’t respond to you.” Charming. Actually, this was an egregiously inaccurate characterization of Spector, but intense emotion overcame reason with that particular member of the digital posse.
That twitter user is actually Tyler Dellow’s significant other. John MacKinnon either did very little research (which seems odd in such a lengthy piece) or he made an editorial decision to keep that information out of his story because it didn’t fit with what he wanted to convey. To say she’s just a member of the digital posse, a wild group of professional outragists makes the point that this group of outsiders should keep their nose out of where it doesn’t belong seem legitimate. That is undermined if you reveal that she would be intimately aware of the history between the two men and has a vested interest in whether or not Dellow is treated fairly in the media.
There’s also:
Another individual who leaped into the fray to defend Dellow, on that and other occasions, was Jonathan Willis, a Fort St. John, B.C.-based blogger and a Dellow protege on the subject of analytics, blogging and much else. Willis, a bright and capable young man, writes pieces on the Oilers that appear on the Journal website under the Cult of Hockey banner, as well as other outlets.
Those other outlets Jonathan Willis has written for other than the Journal and the Cult of Hockey include Sportsnet, ESPN, Grantland, Oilersnation, Copper & Blue, and Bleacher Report. He is easily the most prolific writer about the Edmonton Oilers bar none and a voice of reason at all times. The fact that he is based out of Fort St John is a nice Red Herring from MacKinnon. Willis of course moved to Oklahoma City for the duration of last season to report from the Oilers’ farm team, but that wasn’t mentioned so much as his relative age and current location were. Apparently those weren’t important things to tell readers.
I think the most dishonest part of this skirmish is that there are people warping semantics to appear entirely innocent. When discussing the Eakins quote from the top of this post, MacKinnon has this to say, “Except, it turns out the journalist never used the word ‘prick,’ an obviously inflammatory term.” Hey, what is everybody so worked up about, he didn’t even say the word that’s making everybody mad?
Foremost my response to this is nobody has established that the reporter in question did not say the word “Prick”. And if this person did not actually say that particular word then he said something foul enough in his request for information that the Oilers were prompted to contact his employer. Let’s not let MacKinnon use semantics to make this unnamed reporter who acted unprofessionally in his duties appear innocent.
The assertion that the communication between Oiler PR and media is so relaxed that things like this get said all the time is a poor excuse that simply does not fit the information that is available to us. It was obviously out of turn or the team would not have contacted this person’s employer. Full stop.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this piece is the suggestion that nobody outside of the media should be critical of their coverage. Here he gets to the heart of his problem:
But I was far from Dellow’s only target among the Edmonton media. Shredding a writer’s story line by line was a Dellow specialty, much to the delight of his followers. Part of the blogger culture, in sports and other realms, has been presuming to serve as self-appointed media ombudsmen, holding the supposedly hidebound MSM to account.
It’s these unwashed bloggers that are the problem! How dare they act as media critics? Who are they to demand higher standards of conduct and accountability from the press?
Who am I? I am just somebody who the Press is supposed to be serving. I am the customer. I am the one who is dissatisfied with the job that is being done. I am the one who visits the website and sees all the ads that are being sold or who tunes into the broadcast. And I’m just lucky enough to have a voice loud enough to be heard sometimes.
Should I be the one who is the loudest critic of the media? Probably not. Should it be, as MacKinnon himself writes in his piece, another journalist? I think that would be great.
Unfortunately that’s not what’s happening. Instead of somebody within Edmonton’s own Sports Journalism community acting as its harshest critic they are acting as each other’s defender.
In this case the offending party wasn’t even a member of the Edmonton Journal and yet Journal reporters are rallying to the defense of a man they should most likely be critiquing. The ranks are closing in and apparently not one critic is to be found among them.
Not just are there no critical voices, but bloggers shouldn’t be questioning the integrity of the press either. They know nothing. Beyond that Dallas Eakins shouldn’t even have mentioned anything about this incident.
For Eakins to refer to that private communication months later was gratuitous and obviously inflammatory. Eakins, for good and ill, is prone to err on the side of talking more, not less. He never met a microphone he didn’t like.
That, by the way, is what it looks like when a reporter is advocating against information coming to light. John MacKinnon is literally saying that the public being informed of something that might change the way they think of someone who is responsible for delivering the news was wrong and never should have happened.
DECEPTION
So, here we are, with thin-skinned Dellow devotees erupting over harmless quips delivered on Twitter and with Eakins recklessly spraying fuel on this little intramural fire by making a false accusation on a national radio show.
Devotees like the significant others of the person who was smeared by the press and writers for Sportsnet, ESPN, and the Journal erupting for no reason? Eakins making a “False Accusation” based on semantics because Eakins was probably too polite on Radio to say what was REALLY said that caused the Oilers to respond in a very serious manner?
This level of spin and disinformation on basic facts are exactly why I care about the incident. I don’t like being lied to by the people who are supposed to be providing me the truth.
I don’t care for being deceived.
Follow me on Twitter @Archaeologuy 
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