By Jay Rigdon on

Canadian publication The Hockey News tweeted out their upcoming cover, which they noted was their 2021 Diversity Issue.

That checked out in some ways; the cover promised interviews on diversity issues in hockey with Anson Carter and league exec Kim Davis. Of course, the focus on diversity in the game was undercut a bit by the cover athlete selection:

That’s Zdeno Chara, and not, for example, Anson Carter.

In itself, it’s not a fantastic look for a self-proclaimed Diversity Issue. There was still a way to explain it at least partially, though, by pointing to the dedicated content involved, and admitting that they should have done better with a cover choice. That would have still been a rough road, but having multiple features on a topic can still satisfy requirements for a themed issue, albeit not as forcefully as a full cover would have.

Instead, The Hockey News elected to backpedal completely, deleting the tweet and sending out a note that essentially disavowed any sort of diversity theme at all for the issue.

Predictably this didn’t sit well:

https://twitter.com/hemjhaveri/status/1361720176681619459?s=20

https://twitter.com/DrewLetko/status/1361741727695073284

Having made their decision on how to handle this, it’s unlikely The Hockey News would now release a second update admitting they did in fact originally intend to have a themed issue, but if they do we’ll gladly update this post accordingly, because that would be impossibly entertaining from a clusterfuck perspective.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.

View all posts by Jay Rigdon