Real Salt Lake made headlines last week and not for a spectacular win or exciting trade. Rather, RSL was in the news because the franchise announced that Gordon Monson, a longtime sports columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune, would no longer be permitted to attend games or conduct post-game interviews, effectively barring him from covering RSL soccer matches.
The organization and its relatively new owner, Dell Loy Hansen, were unhappy with Monson’s coverage of the team, which included a scathing column entitled “Is RSL being run into the ground?” that accused Hansen, who bought the team in 2012, of slowly destroying it. “The man with the deep pockets wants to run the club the way he wants to run it,” Monson wrote in August of 2015. “Not the way it should be run, not the way it’s best run. His ego is behind the wheel.”
The organization cited a possible conflict of interest in Monson’s reporting since he co-hosts “The Big Show,” an afternoon sports radio talk show, with Spence Checketts, the son of former RSL owner David Checketts.
“We are not trying to control the message, we are not telling anyone what to write or not to write, but are simply choosing — in this isolated case — to not invite someone, who we feel is unfair and biased and who possesses a conflict of interest into our house,” RSL chief business officer Andrew Carroll told The Tribune in a statement.
After three days of intense scrutiny and criticism, which included The Tribune pulling two other reporters from covering the team, RSL decided to reinstate Monson’s media credentials, permitting him to cover the team after all. This was a good move on RSL’s part. By reconsidering its initial decision, the organization avoided a potential PR disaster that would only hurt its image in the long run.
Media coverage is not always pretty and easy going. A lot of the time it is the exact opposite: hard-hitting, blunt and abrasive. The job of the journalist, whatever their beat, is to ask pressing questions that encourage the reader to think critically and deeply about what they are reading, even if it makes some people uncomfortable. Monson was doing precisely this when he asked whether RSL was being operated poorly. He used facts and substantiated his claims with evidence. He noted that the team had started losing more and more since undergoing new ownership. He pointed out that three prominent figures — the head coach, general manager, and president — had all left since Hansen took over. He predicted, correctly, that RSL would miss the playoffs in 2015 for the first time in almost a decade. There’s nothing in his writing that indicates a personal ax to grind. He simply comes off as a passionate columnist who reports on the facts as he interprets them. That is his job as a writer.
To accuse him of being biased against team ownership is to seriously undermine his integrity and credibility as a professional journalist. Charges that insult a person’s lifelong career should be well substantiated and not taken lightly. The fact that Monson co-hosts a talk radio program with a relative of a former owner does not justify such accusations. Is the world of local sports radio really big enough to eliminate every loose end and ensure nobody knows anyone else? More importantly, would Monson’s impartiality even be in question if he never wrote such a withering column? I seriously doubt it. This isn’t about a conflict of interest; it is about RSL’s inability to deal with criticism.
Monson isn’t the only one who has scorned RSL for its decision making. In a recent article entitled “The Ongoing Fall of Real Salt Lake,” Matt Pentz of The Seattle Times referenced the same concerns and made the same case for the team’s legacy being on a steep decline. He also condemned the organization for barring Monson: “It’s a bad look for a club that seems intent on breaking from the identity of its most successful era by any means necessary,” Pentz wrote.
RSL has problems that can’t be explained by half-baked accusations of prejudiced reporting. The organization should get used to critical coverage because it isn’t going to let up anytime soon.