Tony Kornheiser on Washington Post’s remaining sports coverage: “It’s tremendously insulting’

Tony Kornheiser has watched the Washington Post sports section, which he helped define, get reduced to something he can barely recognize. On the most recent episode of The Tony Kornheiser Show, the news that The Athletic had hired six former Post staffers — including longtime columnist Barry Svrluga — gave him an opening to say so.

“The Washington Post puts out a sports section every day — it’s about 4-6 pages — it’s all wire copy,” Kornheiser began. “It’s big pictures, all wire copy. Sometimes it’s about European soccer, and sometimes it’s about European F1 races, and sometimes it’s about the World Cup, and what’s coming up, and sometimes it’s about something that someone who lives in Washington might be interested in. But it’s written by nobody you know. And it’s written, stylistically, you get all the news frontloaded and then move on, and it doesn’t even have agate. It doesn’t have standings. It doesn’t have box scores.”

Kornheiser spent decades as a sportswriter and columnist at the Post before becoming a fixture on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption alongside Wilbon. It’s quite literally a show that exists because two Post sportswriters spent years arguing in a newsroom that no longer functions the way either of them knew it.

The Post shuttered its sports department on Feb. 4 as part of a round of layoffs that cut roughly one-third of the paper’s total staff. Beat reporters covering the Nationals, Capitals, Commanders, and Wizards were all let go. The paper said it would retain a handful of reporters to cover sports “as a cultural and societal phenomenon” through its features department, with a few remaining on the printed sports section, which is exactly the wire-heavy, agate-free product Kornheiser was describing.

“It’s tremendously insulting,” Kornheiser said of the paper in its current form. “I mean, honestly, it’s tremendously insulting because it’s an excuse for a sports section. It’s not a real sports section.”

This isn’t the first time Kornheiser has addressed the Post’s collapse. Weeks earlier, he devoted an episode to the layoffs alongside former Post editor Jeanne McManus, calling it “a knife in your heart” and lamenting that the capital of the United States no longer had a real newspaper. Wilbon, who spent 30 years at the Post before going to ESPN full-time in 2010, called it “a death” in a conversation with Sally Jenkins for The Atlantic. Neither addressed the layoffs on PTI the day they happened.

The Post’s unraveling had been building long before Feb. 4. Sally Jenkins left for The Atlantic last summer after 20 years. Dan Steinberg went to The Athletic after 23 years. The paper pulled out of its Winter Olympics coverage two weeks before the opening ceremony — after spending over $80,000 on housing — before reversing course under pressure. When Anthony Davis was traded to the Wizards, the Post‘s coverage was a single AP wire story that didn’t appear on the website until more than seven hours after the trade broke.

That’s the sports section Kornheiser is describing. The same paper that broke the Dan Snyder investigation, sent reporters to every Olympics, and produced some of the most important sports journalism in American history, is now frontloading wire copy about European soccer for a Washington audience. The Athletic hiring Svrluga and five of his former colleagues is, in its own way, the Post’s sports section continuing to exist — just somewhere else, behind a different paywall, for a publication owned by the New York Times.