One day last week, with her team, the Connecticut Sun, in a first-round playoff series against WNBA star Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever, guard DiJonai Carrington was surrounded by a group of reporters.
Carrington had swatted Clark in the face while reaching for the ball in the previous game, leaving her with a black eye.
USA Today columnist Christine Brennan had a question: Did you do that on purpose?
No, Carrington said.
Brennan followed up: Were you laughing about it later in the game?
“I just told you I didn’t even know I hit her,” Carrington said.
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The exchange came at a thrilling but tense moment for the league, which has long been powered by women of color but has seen its recent success largely attributed to Clark. The attention on the league has never been greater, but players during the series were subject to upticks in online harassment, and security was added at Connecticut’s home arena.
It was with this backdrop that the questions didn’t sit well in the Connecticut locker room, and a few minutes later, the Sun’s DeWanna Bonner confronted Brennan.
Brennan repeatedly tried to introduce herself and explain what she said as Bonner implored the columnist to treat her teammates like humans. After nearly two minutes of mostly talking past each other, Bonner returned to the locker room. (Brennan confirmed the confrontation to The Washington Post.)
Brennan, who is working on a book about Clark and routinely appears on TV, approached the other reporters and remarked that something like that wouldn’t happen in the NFL. She asked why the WNBA was so sensitive and told multiple reporters that if anyone had questions about her awareness of the racial dynamics at play, they should read her coverage of former NFL quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick, among other work stretching back decades. (Brennan is White; Carrington is Black.)
Three days later, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association issued a statement calling for the league to revoke the credential of Brennan, one of the most recognizable sports journalists in the country.
“To unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan: You are not fooling anyone. That so-called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating into a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure,” the statement read. It added: “You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued to you.”
Brennan, in an interview, called her questions “journalism 101.”
“It’s something that I have done in the entirety of my career,” she said, “and I think every other journalist has done the entirety of his or her career.”
Other journalists, including her boss at USA Today, agreed.
“We reject the notion that the interview perpetuated any narrative other than to get the player’s perspective directly,” USA Today executive sports editor Roxanna Scott said in a statement.
But the saga has nonetheless become a major storyline of the WNBA playoffs, at a time when Clark’s enduring stardom and the league’s unprecedented growth are testing the league’s relationship with the media.
“When I saw the video [of the questions to Carrington], my heart dropped,” Terri Jackson, the executive director of the players union, said in an interview. “I was so upset because we already have people looking to attack these players. We’re talking about being safe at work.”
A WNBA spokesman did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did Scott.
Brennan, 66, is a pioneer in sports journalism. She was the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media in the 1980s (when she worked for The Washington Post). She remembers going to her editors and asking why the paper didn’t cover the major women’s golf tournaments or the women’s Final Four – and promptly got some of those assignments.
“I cannot tell you the number of times my male colleagues – and some of them dear friends – have teased me or ridiculed me for my coverage of women’s sports,” she said.
Brennan said her upcoming book, On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, is “unauthorized” and that she has not done a sit-down interview with Clark. It’s expected to be published next season. Its scope goes beyond Clark, but she is its driving force.
Clark helped the league secure a huge increase in its new broadcast deals and her games have set attendance records and driven TV ratings spikes. Fox Sports executive Mike Mulvihill posted on social media recently that the audience for Clark’s national TV games during the regular season averaged 1.178 million but was 394,000 for all others.
Still, some reporters and league stakeholders have bristled at what they see as the narrowness of Brennan’s coverage, which has focused almost exclusively on Clark. Reporters pointed to an April column in which Brennan asked why players are “frosty” toward Clark. And she was deeply critical in stories, on TV and on social media about Clark being left off the U.S. Olympic team.
Brennan wrote another piece from the Olympics after the U.S. team advanced to the gold medal game, headlined: “US women’s basketball should draw huge Paris crowds but isn’t. Team needed Caitlin Clark.” The announced attendance was 11,919, only around 300 fewer fans than the U.S. men’s semifinal comeback victory against Serbia the day before.
Brennan said she did not write the headline and agreed it was misleading. She said the column itself highlighted the lack of media attention and VIPs at the game, adding: “The whole point of saying Caitlin Clark should have been on the team was to bring eyeballs that this team so deserves that it just never gets.”
“Her coverage has gone way beyond what is normal,” said Gregory Lee Jr., a former editor at the Athletic and professor at Loyola University New Orleans, who said he wouldn’t speak with Brennan for her book even though she reached out. “The way she’s covering Caitlin Clark, you’re asking, ‘Is she Caitlin Clark’s PR agent?’” (Lee is a former editor at The Post.)
Added Terrika Foster-Brasby, the sideline reporter for the Connecticut Sun: “I think it’s wonderful she wants to write a book on Caitlin Clark, but I do think it’s a gross misuse to use those media availabilities to gather content for your book and make players uncomfortable.”
She continued: “It’s disheartening for those other athletes who have wanted an opportunity to have media coverage and you’re taking the opportunity to speak with them but never ask anything about them.”
Brennan said she has spoken to a number of players about topics that ranged far beyond Clark.
Jackson, the president of the WNBA players association, spoke to Brennan this summer. She said she left the conversation troubled.
“It was exhausting,” Jackson said. “I said this season wasn’t a flip of the switch. We had the covid bubble season, other periods. I’ve been here nine years, and I said, ‘You are doing a disservice to the history [by focusing only on Caitlin].’”
Brennan said she was stunned the interview with Jackson could be misconstrued as anything other than a reporter looking for information.
“When you cover a sport, you write about the big story,” Brennan said. “Over the years covering golf, I wrote probably over 100 columns on Tiger Woods and ignored almost all the other golfers.”
The WNBA has long had a fraught relationship with reporters. Last year, several New York Liberty players were fined for not talking with reporters after the Finals, and the league has shut off reporters’ access to locker rooms. Legacy media and newspapers have often made coverage of the league an afterthought.
But that is changing. With Clark leading the headlines, talking heads and many former NBA players have spent this season discussing the league at length, with many of those same people telling WNBA players to be grateful for Clark. Several reporters who cover the WNBA said there remains tension whenever reporters ask about Clark, even as Clark continues to drive interest in and revenue for the league.
After Brennan’s questions to Carrington last week, Jackson said she spoke with leadership in the players union and there was widespread agreement that they needed to respond.
But when the union ventured into the territory of questioning Brennan’s credentials, the story morphed from a referendum on a high-profile columnist’s reporting to whether she should be allowed to do that reporting at all. Several reporters around the league called it a blatant overreaction.
“The WNBA and its players keep fumbling their golden opportunity with a string of ill-advised decisions and PR gaffes exposing them as not being ready for prime time,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Tara Sullivan.
Michael Rosenberg, a Sports Illustrated columnist who has covered the WNBA, said in an interview: “Decline to answer someone’s questions, complain to them privately, or rip them publicly. That’s all fair. But I think credentials should only be pulled for clear violations of professional ethics.”
The critique of Brennan’s questions was rooted less in the questions themselves than in the climate in which they were asked.
Carrington has been the subject of intense social media harassment. She posted a screenshot of an email she received in which she was called a racial slur and threatened with sexual violence. Someone else posted a picture of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck with a picture of Carrington superimposed over Floyd’s face and Clark’s superimposed on the officer’s.
According to a report in Andscape, the crowd in Connecticut during the playoff series was trafficking in racially coded trash talk, too. One fan’s shirt read “Ban Nails,” and one fan shouted at Carrington when she fell, “What, did you trip on your eyelashes?”
“In my 11-year career I never experienced the racial comments like from the Indiana Fever fan base,” Sun forward Alyssa Thomas said after the series.
“We certainly know that there are many people who are racist who attack Black people on Twitter,” Brennan said. “That is a fact. It is horrible. … In the case of asking the follow-up I did, it was giving … DiJonai Carrington the chance to address an issue that was already on Twitter and being discussed by, what? Tens of thousands of people? Hundreds of thousands? Millions of people?”
Brennan said USA Today is planning to request a credential so she can cover the WNBA Finals.