The Washington Post once stood by the mantra that democracy dies in darkness. Now, apparently, so does coverage of their local sports teams after the trade of Anthony Davis to the Washington Wizards.
If there was a script for the tragic shuttering of the Washington Post sports department on Wednesday, of course, it would come with one of the biggest stories to hit the local NBA team in years. Earlier on Wednesday, what was feared for weeks finally became official as the legendary paper announced mass layoffs, including what amounts to the closing down of its sports section. What once was the home of Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, John Feinstein, Thomas Boswell, and so many others would now cease to exist.
Then later that afternoon, a shock NBA trade went down with the Washington Wizards acquiring Anthony Davis from the Dallas Mavericks one year after receiving him in the trade heard round the world for Luka Dončić. Davis was dealt to the nation’s capital for a variety of players, picks, and expiring contracts. While the Mavs are instantly choosing to rebuild around Cooper Flagg, the Wizards suddenly have Davis and Trae Young and a roster of exciting young players to hopefully get back to the postseason in the East in future years.
But what could have been an opportunity for meaningful local coverage has now been lost at the Washington Post. Instead of news and analysis about the trade, all that exists on the paper’s website is a lone syndicated article from the Associated Press by Schuyler Dixon.
Furthermore, the article appears to have hit the Post website at 8:37 p.m. ET. The trade was first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania at 1:44 p.m. ET in the afternoon. That means that the Post went hours without any coverage of one of the biggest local sports stories to hit DC in the last year. And when it finally did, it was with an article that literally could have been found at countless other AP syndicated outlets.
The writing has been on the wall for a complete lack of local coverage of DC sports for weeks now, going back to when Georgetown coach Ed Cooley struck a child in the stands with a thrown water bottle, and it wasn’t referenced at the Post for many hours. But the Wizards making a move for Anthony Davis is a whole different stratosphere of news. Any local market would be poorly served if any one of its sports teams made a move this big without local coverage. But the fact that this has happened in Washington to the Post is one of the most shocking developments in modern media.
Alas, this is the fate that has now been sealed for what once was the best sports section in America. The residents of Washington, DC, deserve so much better; its sports fans deserve so much better; and all the staff who made the paper what it was deserve so much better. It’s a sad microcosm for not just what has happened at the Washington Post, but the continued decline of local media across the country.
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