If there’s one thing ESPN never runs out of, it’s hot takes. And now, Stephen A. Smith has found himself in the middle of another one. This time, the comments came from fellow ESPN veteran Michael Wilbon, and let’s just say they weren’t exactly wrapped in a gift box.
Wilbon recently appeared on the Awful Announcing Podcast with Brandon Contes. During the conversation, he talked about the sports media world and how much it has changed. Then he dropped a comment that quickly got people talking. He suggested that Stephen A. Smith is no longer really a journalist.
“Stop, you’re not a journalist anymore. You’re not doing what you did at the Philly Inquirer,” Wilbon said. “Stop, dude. I know what you did there because I was shoulder to shoulder with you at press row and in press boxes and at practice. Stephen A. is a show. He knows it. He wants to be the show, and he’s doing a damn good job at it. That’s what he wants to be. He has now spawned a whole generation of people who want to be the show. Good for Stephen A.; he knows that.”
Well, you knew Stephen wasn’t going to let that slide.
Smith responded the way only Stephen A. Smith can. Loud, confident, and with enough passion to power a small city.
“I wasn’t trying to imply that I’m a journalist meaning I’m in the locker room being accountable to the people I talk about every single story or every single angle that I take. I don’t have the time. I do 22 hours of live content per week, over 900 hours a year,” Smith said. “I am universally recognized, if for nothing else, my hard work. But because I’m not a beat writer anymore in the locker room, folks want to say I’m not a journalist. You don’t get the right to say that. Mike Wilbon does, because Mike Wilbon has done it. And I get where Michael Wilbon is coming from, because he’s speaking in a literal sense about what I do right now.
“When I say to an athlete that will come at me or anybody else in sports that I’m a journalist, I’m talking about by trade and nature. I’m talking about a body of work that spans decades. No, I don’t have to do that anymore. I’ve graduated. There are journalists, there are columnists. There’s columnists and there’s commentators and radio hosts. Everything comes with it, but the point is responsibilities change, but the nature of who you are isn’t.
“I don’t just come on the air and bloviate out the mouth. I make phone calls, I have resources, people educate me about what’s going on all the damn time. I’m just not in somebody’s face immediately upon talking about them because I don’t have the means to be able to do that. …I gotta be in studio mic’d up, etcetera. Different responsibilities. But the nature of what we do as pundits, as commentators, as radio hosts, etcetera, emanates in my case from years of journalism at the New York Daily News, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, at CNN, at Fox Sports, at ESPN, at SiriusXM. That’s my career. It comes from some place. But Mike Wilbon’s answering that question because it’s presented to him in a fashion that says, ‘Stephen A. always says he’s a journalist, but this is what he is doing,’ as opposed to me saying, ‘I’m a journalist based on what I’ve done and what my nature is.’ I don’t just talk, I get intel, I cultivate sources, I network.”
In the end, this isn’t really a fight about who won. It’s a reminder that sports media keeps changing. Some reporters stay reporters, others become personalities. Stephen A. Smith became one of the biggest personalities in sports television, and that’s hard to argue with, even if Michael Wilbon isn’t ready to call it journalism anymore.
