Stephen A. Smith responds to Michael Wilbon suggesting he’s no longer a journalist

[ASFN Admin]

You must be registered for see images attach

Credit: Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports

Michael Wilbon, the longtime host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, joined Brandon Contes on the Awful Announcing Podcast this week to discuss a wide range of topics about the industry, but there was one comment in particular that caught the attention of his ESPN colleague Stephen A. Smith.

Asked by Contes about whether what Smith does on his daily show First Take can be considered journalism in the same way a reporter who goes into locker rooms every day is considered a journalist, Wilbon decided to “take a page out of” Stephen A.’s book and give a fiery opinion about his colleague.


“Stop, you’re not a journalist anymore. You’re not doing what you did at the Philly Inquirer,” Wilbon said. “Stop, dude. I know what you did there because I was shoulder to shoulder with you at press row and in press boxes and at practice. Stephen A. is a show. He knows it. He wants to be the show, and he’s doing a damn good job at it. That’s what he wants to be. He has now spawned a whole generation of people who want to be the show. Good for Stephen A.; he knows that.”

It didn’t take long for Smith to respond on his SiriusXM show, defending his credentials as a journalist, but explaining that what he does on First Take is much different. Amid some shots at Awful Announcing, which he called “slick” for the line of questioning given to Wilbon, Smith explained he’d “graduated” from the daily grind of locker rooms and press boxes.


“I wasn’t trying to imply that I’m a journalist meaning I’m in the locker room being accountable to the people I talk about every single story or every single angle that I take. I don’t have the time. I do 22 hours of live content per week, over 900 hours a year,” Smith said. “I am universally recognized, if for nothing else, my hard work. But because I’m not a beat writer anymore in the locker room, folks want to say I’m not a journalist. You don’t get the right to say that. Mike Wilbon does, because Mike Wilbon has done it. And I get where Michael Wilbon is coming from, because he’s speaking in a literal sense about what I do right now.

“When I say to an athlete that will come at me or anybody else in sports that I’m a journalist, I’m talking about by trade and nature. I’m talking about a body of work that spans decades. No, I don’t have to do that anymore. I’ve graduated. There are journalists, there are columnists. There’s columnists and there’s commentators and radio hosts. Everything comes with it, but the point is responsibilities change, but the nature of who you are isn’t.

“I don’t just come on the air and bloviate out the mouth. I make phone calls, I have resources, people educate me about what’s going on all the damn time. I’m just not in somebody’s face immediately upon talking about them because I don’t have the means to be able to do that. …I gotta be in studio mic’d up, etcetera. Different responsibilities. But the nature of what we do as pundits, as commentators, as radio hosts, etcetera, emanates in my case from years of journalism at the New York Daily News, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, at CNN, at Fox Sports, at ESPN, at SiriusXM. That’s my career. It comes from some place. But Mike Wilbon’s answering that question because it’s presented to him in a fashion that says, ‘Stephen A. always says he’s a journalist, but this is what he is doing,’ as opposed to me saying, ‘I’m a journalist based on what I’ve done and what my nature is.’ I don’t just talk, I get intel, I cultivate sources, I network.”

Smith, to his credit, offered some great clarity about why he labels himself as a journalist, making a distinction between what he does on First Take and what he did at newspapers to begin his career. And as he points out, he still does many of the things that trained journalists do, particularly maintaining relationships with sources that can provide information and context about the stories he’s covering each day. It’s just that his medium has changed. He’s graduated.

Whether or not that means Smith is a “journalist” now, at this very moment, is beside the point. To him, he earned the label through years of working his way up in the business. Becoming a television pundit, in Smith’s estimation, doesn’t take the journalist label away. It just means he’s using the skill set in a different context.

The post Stephen A. Smith responds to Michael Wilbon suggesting he’s no longer a journalist appeared first on Awful Announcing.

Continue reading...