If Monson evokes these kinds of emotions from you or anyone else, guess what? He's already won. because he's doing his job by doing so, even if his critics don't recognize it. From a pure sportswriting perspective, Monson's writing is good, not great. He's a million miles from being T.J. Simers in his prime as a pot-stirrer, and his prose ain't gonna remind anyone of Jim Murray or Blackie Sherrod, two of my all-time favorites. But he gets people talking and responding. And as newspapers lose the influence and dominance they have within media, coupled with a decidedly niche listenership (sports talk radio is still very much a niche market in all but a handful of markets nationally; SLC is no exception to this), Monson remains the undisputed king of sports media in the state of Utah.
You think Monson is getting punked, but RSL pulling this stunt that it did only enhances that status. Do you really think anyone else in the largely milquetoast SLC sports media could evoke this kind of reaction from anyone else?
Sports fans are a passionate bunch, but they're also wildly hypocritical. They want sportswriters to give the enemy the 60 Minutes/Mike Wallace-showing-up-unannounced-at-the-front-door treatment, but they want their own team to be covered by Oprah. As it pertains to Utah athletics, I think Utah fans to varying degrees suffer (in their own self-inflicted ways) because there isn't a Dick Harmon-type covering our program, and I know how Ute fans go after him for his Pollyannish ways. Can't have it both ways.
Having walked in Monson's shoes in much more lightly tread areas of the country (translation: I didn't have nearly the readership), I can honestly say most sports writers and columnists are more amused than angered by their critics, if only for the fact that they so frequently put on display their own ignorance and/or bias when "critiquing" the performance of a media member. That said, I was thrilled to see Terry Orme react like he did -- and regardless of what you think of Monson, everyone else should be too. He has his writers' collective backs, which will empower them to not only do their job, but do the tough jobs we need and ask of a free press to do.
Wanna know what keeps journalists up at night? It certainly isn't getting their readers' panties twisted in a bunch, it's the fear of truly fucking up and ending up in court. Making the news instead of being the news. There is a ton of complexity to the following story, but I'll give the Cliff Notes version: I once worked at a newspaper that was sued by Bo Jackson. And he had us dead to rights. My sports editor attended a seminar on PEDs, and he quoted a nutritionist as saying that Bo's hip replacement surgery was necessitated because of anabolic steroid use. She denied it, and IIRC there was video of the event that caught our sports editor talking to her, and our sports editor wasn't taking notes and didn't record the interview.
I was off the day the story would've passed my eyes for editing. When the lawsuit was announced -- and it made SportsCenter and every newspaper (
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sport...traction_x.htm ) of significance in the country when it was filed -- I was initially relieved that my ass was safe. Then I was pissed off that I wasn't on the copy desk that night to see that the quote never made the light of day. Then I thought to myself, "Would I have caught it for sure?" This was in an era in which everyone freely floated opinions in everyday conversation that Athlete X was on steroids.
In the end, the SE was fired, we ran an apology and retraction and I moved to Kansas a few months later. In a very interesting twist, my (now former) newspaper ran the same apology and retraction several years later -- indicating to me that the lawsuit had not yet been settled (It likely has been by now, but I do not know the particulars). I do know that Bo refiled the lawsuit because his initial filing was thrown out by an Illinois judge on the basis that said judge didn't have jurisdiction over what a California newspaper published. I also know that because one of the parties sued initially -- the fired SE's predecessor -- was wrongly named in Bo's initial lawsuit, that he got some nice autographed schwag from Bo for the inconvenience. The wrong sports editor was sued, because the staff directory that was posted online had not been updated. No other member of the sports department was sued outside of the SE -- just the publisher and editor-in-chief. Bo Knows Newspaper Hierarchy.
Back to Monson. Wanna hate him, not read him? I'm surely not going to force your hand. Wanna make him irrelevant? Ignore him. Become apathetic. By and large, he's just another sports writer to me. I read his stuff occasionally. But this hullabaloo over revoking his credentials got me to read one prior piece of his on RSL, and I suspect I'm hardly alone in this matter. I also found out about the credential revoking on Twitter from Monson critics, who are on his payroll without even knowing it.