Watching a Parallel Media Try to Make Trump the Big Sports Story

November 19, 2024
By: Dave Zirin

The president-elect did not dominate the world of sports this weekend, but Fox News and Internet tabloids are inventing new realities.

On Monday, my phone rang with an Atlanta area code. It was TMZ, a celebrity-obsessed news outlet for people who find The National Enquirer to be snooty. I scoured my brain for any Hollywood love triangle I might be embroiled in, to no avail. The person on the other line, however, wasn’t looking for scandal. It was a producer who wanted me to come on their television program, TMZ Live, to talk about “Donald Trump dominating the sports weekend.” I knew that TMZ founder Harvey Levin was a Trumpist ally and that, despite a stormy relationship, Trump has greatly valued Levin’s greasy gossip empire. There was that Daily Beast article from Trump’s first term about “TMZ going MAGA.” And then in 2021, TMZ was also sold to Fox Corporation—which also owns Fox News Media—so I politely declined, more out of lack of interest than any kind of political principle.

The call, however, made me curious. I follow sports for a living, and the idea of Trump “dominating the sports weekend” seemed odd. I googled “Trump dominates sports” to see what I’d been missing. There was one match. It was on Fox News, where one of their writers, Ryan Gaydos, published a short article with the headline: “Trump support dominates weekend in sports.” OK. I guess the common use of the word “dominate” could be a coincidence, but then I decided to see what constituted this “domination.”

The opening sentence of the Fox News piece was, “The NFL, UFC, boxing and college football had a stranglehold [on our attention?] and there was one underlying theme across the sports landscape.”

The “underlying theme,” of course, was Trump. But what is the evidence for such a bombastic statement? Did players speak out for Trump? Was Patrick Mahomes celebrating the violence necessary to deport 10 million people in his postgame press conference and I just missed it? The answer is no. What Fox and TMZ wanted to pound into our heads—“The Sports World Loves Trump!”—is backed by evidence thinner than Stephen Miller’s spray-on hair.

Let’s go through the sports that Fox News said Trump was dominating. All that happened in the NFL was three different players in two different games doing that demented dance Trump does at the end of rallies. Eight years ago, when far more players took a knee to protest police violence and later to protest Trump’s calling them “sons of bitches,” there were no stories on TMZ about how “fighting police brutality is now hot hot hot!”

What about college football? Gaydos admits at the end of the article, “College football didn’t appear to have anyone new doing the dance move.” (It wasn’t just “anyone new.” I couldn’t find a record of anyone. Not even in the SEC!)

In boxing, the big fight of the weekend was, of course, 58-year-old Mike Tyson against YouTube influencer and living symbol of American declinism Jake Paul. Neither did anything Trumpian during the fight, but that did not stop Gaydos from including them on his list, since Paul and Tyson had endorsed Trump previously.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship did indeed include an in-person Trump celebration on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, the site of Trump’s hate rally from the previous month. UFC—and its audience of aggro young men—has always been an electoral base for Trump both among fighters and fans. On Saturday night, heavyweight Jon Jones (who has his own star-crossed story) gave his UFC Championship belt to Trump to hold in front of the cheering throngs. None of this should be surprising, since UFC is ruthlessly controlled by Dana White, a longtime Trump donor who spoke at both the Republican National Convention and the MSG hate rally. It is White who ensures that the UFC will always be a safe space for Trump’s thin skin.

So what is our collective evidence that Trump “dominated” the sports world this weekend? That would be three dancing football players and the typical fealty of the UFC. Yes, there are right-wing players in the NFL, and yes the UFC still loves Trump. Yawn. This isn’t a story. It’s a few tweets at most. Yet here is Fox News with a, to be kind, thin article and then TMZ picking it up joyously, as if it had just won the pay-per-view rights to dig up Princess Diana’s grave.

Painfully, we now have a parallel media structure that is bigger than just belching out fake news. It now has the power to create its own reality. If you want to believe that Trump is now “dominating the sports world,” Fox News and TMZ will show you a magical land of alternative facts. Did Trump lead a coup or sexually assault countless women? You’d never know it.

The mainstream media bears a great share of the blame for the way people consume right-wing disinformation. The media has lost trust and bled subscribers and viewers. (Its work over the past year doing public relations for the Israel Defense Forces was particularly shameful.) It is not surprising, as trust has eroded, that people have sought new media with different facts, but choosing a more pernicious set of lies is no answer. We know from history that having the right ideas is never enough. They need to be backed by movements—and media—committed to fighting the falsehoods.