Boston Magazine’s Associate Art Director Liz Noftle gave The Atlantic Wire the story of how the magazine’s staff created the gorgeous cover for its issue exploring the Boston Marathon bombings. “The heart almost feels like it’s beating,” she explained of the decision to have the color of the shoes radiate outward:

I actually might have done without the heart, and just let the beauty of the shoes speak for themselves. My first thought was actually that the cover design reminded me of a mandala, the religious symbols that are maps of the universe, though obviously without the traditional four gates. There’s something to the idea not that you can find good in even the worse things, but that the full range of human experiences is represented in tragedy. And the full range of human experience is a humbling thing to see all at once.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (R) today introduced an amendment to the Marketplace Fairness Act that would end the practice of allowing professional sports leagues to qualify as tax-exempt organizations, a move that would hit leagues like the National Football League, the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) Tour, and the National Hockey League, among others.

Since 1966, the tax code has allowed leagues to classify as 501(c)(6) charitable organizations — a classification used by trade and industry organizations — under the assumption that the leagues were promoting the general value of their sports. But Coburn’s amendment asserts that the leagues are not non-profits engaged in the promotion of their sports but instead are businesses interested solely in the promotion of their business; that is, the NFL isn’t so much concerned about promoting the general sport of football as it is concerned with promoting NFL football, because it is the NFL brand and the NFL teams and logos and products that make it a profitable business. The NFL, for instance, didn’t seem interested in promoting the general spread of football when a competitor league, the United States Football League, was formed in 1983. Likewise, the PGA Tour, NHL, and other sports leagues serve to promote their brand of their sports, not the sport as a whole.

Further, the leagues hardly pay their executives as if they are non-profits. The NFL paid $51.5 million to just eight executives in 2010, according to Coburn, and other leagues are similar — PGA commissioner Tim Finchem made $5.2 million that year, while NHL commissioner Gary Bettman took home $4.3 million.

In his 2012 Waste Book that chronicled government waste, Coburn said that taxpayers were losing as much as $91 million a year subsidizing professional sports leagues because of their non-profit status:

The National Football League (NFL), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) classify themselves as non-profit organizations to exempt themselves from federal income taxes on earnings. Smaller sports leagues, such as the National Lacrosse League, are also using the tax status. Taxpayers may be losing at least $91 million subsidizing these tax loopholes for professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits. Taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize sports organizations already benefiting widely from willing fans and turning a profit, while claiming to be non-profit organizations.

The 501(c)(6) provision, specifically amended in 1966 to add “professional football leagues,” states that “[n]o part of a business league’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual and it may not be organized for profit to engage in an activity ordinarily carried on for profit.” That would seem a hard standard for most professional leagues to meet, given the amount of revenue they make and the benefits they provide to the people involved. Individual team owners, in fact, benefit substantially from the league’s structure and even its classification as a non-profit organization.

Read more

The National Football League will improve its outreach and education efforts about its anti-discrimination policy, which expanded to prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2011, according to an agreement it reached with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D). Schneiderman and the NFL have been in talks to improve enforcement and awareness of the policy since the end of the league’s pre-draft combine, when prospective draft picks (including Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o) were asked if they were gay.

Schneiderman announced the agreement, which requires the NFL to display notices of its policy in locker rooms and to conduct training for players and employees involved in hiring, Wednesday morning:

Following discussions with the Attorney General’s office, the NFL will undertake new actions to reinforce its policies against discrimination based on sexual orientation, including the development and dissemination of posters to be displayed in locker rooms throughout the league conveying the NFL’s anti-discrimination policies.

The NFL will also take steps to distribute the policy to all 32 teams in the league, conduct training across the league around the policy — including for rookies and individuals involved in hiring and recruitment of new players — and strengthen protocols concerning the reporting of complaints of discrimination or harassment by players.

This is, of course, a positive development, as a non-discrimination policy is rather useless if players, scouts, executives, and league hiring officials don’t know about it or what it means. But if the NFL wants to make itself a truly inclusive place for gay players, employees, and fans, it still needs to do more.

CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman reported last month that there is a gay NFL player who is considering coming out, and that his biggest concern is not how his teammates or coaches and executives will react. Instead, it’s how much abuse he will receive from fans. That’s a legitimate concern, one that is harder for teams and the NFL to control. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t steps the NFL can take to control it — both to the benefit of gay players and to gay fans.

The league could, for instance, post notices in stadiums (similar to those it will post in locker rooms) alerting fans that discriminatory behavior and language directed at players won’t be tolerated by teams and security officials, clarifying that such language counts as the kind of disruptive behavior that all stadiums tell ticketholders can get them ejected. It could also require teams to include notices in season ticket packages that let fans know that anyone who displays discriminatory behavior could have their tickets revoked or suspended. It won’t be possible for security to notice every fan who calls a player a “faggot,” but there are simple steps the league can take to promote an atmosphere of inclusion. That atmosphere by default would help fans both police themselves and the other fans around them.

This isn’t just important for making it easier for the first NFL player to come out of the closet. It’s also important because there are millions of gay NFL fans in the United States, and they deserve to watch football in the same type of inclusive environment the NFL is promoting among its players.

As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev unwound last Friday, one of the most common anxious jokes I heard was that when it was all over over, Ben Affleck, who grew up in the Boston area and made his bones with movies like Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, and The Town was going to walk away with an armload of Academy Awards for whatever movie he inevitably makes about the Boston Marathon bombing—and bombers. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explain that it’s possible that Tsarnaev, who is recovering from serious injuries and has been indicted on charges of weapons of mass destruction use and malicious damage of property resulting in death, could try to hire an entertainment lawyer to negotiate the sale of his life rights, or to block a movie about him altogether:

Massachusetts is among many states these days that has a “right of publicity” law. This statute prevents unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s “name, portrait or picture.” Further, the law is described as similar to one enacted in New York, which is important because in a rather unprecedented move a few weeks ago, a New York judge temporarily blocked Lifetime Television from airing a movie about convicted killer Chris Porco after the subject sued. But the judge’s restraining order was stayed after Lifetime cried about the potential disaster to free speech.

For that reason, it’s almost guaranteed — although not totally because Massachusetts has no appellate case law on the topic — that Tsarnaev wouldn’t be able to stop any production company from making a movie about his life.

He makes clear that it would be hard for Tsarnaev to block a project entirely, or to guarantee that he got paid: courts have tended to side with filmmakers on free speech grounds, though some criminals and accused criminals have won the right to some compensation from projects that retell their stories. But the entire scenario raises uncomfortable questions about what it takes to lock down the rights to a good story in Hollywood. Would someone decide it’s worth it, even if it meant paying someone who is accused of killing and maiming dozens of people? And would they pay up if the money had to go to a compensation fund rather than to Tsarnaev himself, an arrangement that would be the equivalent of paying bombing survivors for their injuries, especially given the steep medical costs many of them are facing, and the fact that donations may not be enough to cover all of their needs? I hate the idea of seeing Tsarnaev get paid for the harm he’s caused the Boston area over the past two weeks. But as a moral exercise, I’m grimly curious what kind of price Hollywood would put on his story.

On Saturday, at the first baseball game in Boston after a suspension of the one that was scheduled to be played as city police and federal officials were hunting for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, David Ortiz declared at a pregame ceremony, “This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong. Thank you.” Normally, this is the kind of thing that would have invited a fine, but Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted on the agency’s official account: “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.”

It was an apparently inconsistency with agency policy that lead Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Erik Loomis to note: “It would be nice if the FCC would more generally assume people are grown-ups and allow the language used in everyday life to be part of mass media on a more general basis. I’m not sure that reserving the word for political occasions where the agency’s head deems it appropriate has much value.”

He may not precisely get his wish. But the good news is that the FCC is opening up comments “on whether the full Commission should make changes to its current broadcast indecency policies or maintain them as they are.” As Eriq Gardner explains further in The Hollywood Reporter:

According to an advance copy of a document set to be published on Friday in the Federal Register, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau and the Office of General Counsel is seeking comments on whether it should maintain current protocol or change with the times on issues including isolated expletives on TV and fleeting instances of non-sexual nudity. The call for comments will surely invite attention from broadcasters who have fought several high-profile legal battles in recent years. Broadcasters believe that it’s time for a change.

In 1978, in FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court took a look at comedian George Carlin’s famous monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” and considered the government’s role in regulating indecency over the public airwaves. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens upheld the FCC’s authority while preaching some vague restraint. “We simply hold that when the Commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene,” he wrote.

This is a significant opportunity to reassess an area of broadcast policy that’s shifted back and forth over time and that observers on every side of the debate have found frustrating. It’s an area where I’ll almost be as curious to read the comments and see how they break down as to see where the final ruling lands, particularly given our current debate over the impact of depictions of violence in the media on real-world acts of violence. And I hope one area of the conversation that emerges is the relative treatments of sexual content, sexual violence, and other categories of violence. If parents really believe that violent media has an enormous real-world effect on their children, I’d expect to see more people writing in to suggest that depictions of violence be treated with similar care and suspicion as depictions of nude bodies or consensual sexuality. And I hope we can have a discussion about the actual relative harms of these depictions, and of fleeting language, uttered in instances in which public figures behave a lot more like human beings than most of the people we actually see on television.

Reno Saccocia has been the head football coach at Steubenville High School since 1983. He has won 311 football games, made 23 appearances in the state playoffs, and captured three Ohio state championships. That, apparently, is all that matters to the school board that covers the high school, because it just gave Saccocia — who also may have covered up the sexual assault of a teenage girl by two of his players, according to court documents, and is the likely subject of a grand jury investigation because of it — a two-year contract extension.

The extension is for an administrative services position, separate from a coaching contract. Salon’s Katie McDonough flagged the announcement buried in the local business section of the Ohio Valley Star:

Two-year administrative contracts for Charles Kokiko, administrator; Bryan Mills, assistant middle school principal; Reno Saccoccia, director of administrative services; Joseph Yanok, middle school principal; Melinda Young, director of programs; and Sara Elliot, school psychologist.

Covering up the sexual assault, which became front-page news across the nation this spring, would be a violation of Ohio law. But Saccocia’s players were so confident that he’d have their backs that the morning after the assault took place, Trent Mays, who along with Ma’Lik Richmond was found guilty of raping the teenage girl, texted a friend: “I got Reno. He took care of it and shit ain’t gonna happen, even if they did take it to court. Like he was joking about it so I’m not worried.”

A 16-year-old girl is assaulted, a player thinks “shit ain’t gonna happen” because he has a coach who will cover it up, and the coach willfully obliges. For that, the coach doesn’t get fired, but instead gets treated with the same “shit happens” attitude he apparently instilled in his players. There are no winners in Steubenville, no matter what Saccocia’s record on the football field says, because Steubenville is what America’s rape culture looks like.

Brittney Griner, the former Baylor University basketball star who this week became the top overall pick in the WNBA Draft, came out in a recent interview as already openly gay. Griner hadn’t been asked publicly about her sexuality before, but she told both USA Today and ESPN that she had been openly gay during her Baylor career.

Despite the public perception that female athletes are more likely to be gay, it isn’t always easy for women to be open about their sexuality in sports. Griner faced issues on that front too, both because of her sexuality and her looks, but being an openly gay athlete “wasn’t too difficult,” she said in different interviews this week:

“It was hard, just being picked on for being different, just being bigger, my sexuality, everything,” she said. “I overcame it and got over it. Definitely something that I am very passionate about. I want to work with kids and bring recognition to the problem, especially with the LGBT community.” [...]

“It really wasn’t too difficult, I wouldn’t say I was hiding or anything like that,” Griner said. “I’ve always been open about who I am and my sexuality. So, it wasn’t hard at all. If I can show that I’m out and I’m fine and everything’s OK, then hopefully the younger generation will definitely feel the same way.”

What makes this more remarkable, though, is that Griner was open about her sexuality at Baylor, a university that has been a bastion of homophobia. Baylor, after all, is a Baptist university in the heart of Texas, a school that in 2004 stripped an openly gay student of his scholarship and, as recently as 2011, offered a course suggesting homosexuality was a “gateway drug” and banned openly gay men and women from serving on its faculty. Its president is Kenneth Starr, who defended California’s anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 in front of the state Supreme Court, and it has for years refused to officially recognize gay rights student groups.

And yet, when its star basketball player and one of the faces of its university happens to be gay, the school was remarkably silent. That Griner is gay wasn’t widely known, though the fact that she wasn’t “hiding or anything like that” would suggest that it was because no one in the media bothered to ask and not because she didn’t feel like she could speak out about it while playing for Baylor (Baylor coach Kim Mulkey recently dismissed questions about players’ sexuality, saying, “I don’t think it’s anybody’s business.”).

Perhaps that’s a sign that Baylor’s stance has moderated, if only slightly. Or perhaps — and this scenario seems more likely — the school overlooked Griner’s sexuality because she was a talented basketball player who was among the athletes bringing positive attention to a university that has been the face of scandal in the sports world. Either way, Griner is committed to helping other young women realize that who they are is nothing to hide. And hopefully, as she continues to bring attention to her alma mater as she moves up the basketball ladder, her success will also help the people running Baylor realize that its OK to accept people as they are even if they don’t possess otherworldly skills on the basketball court.

The Detroit Tigers in March signed All-Star pitcher Justin Verlander to a contract that will pay him about $180 million over the next seven years, a record sum for a Major League pitcher and an amount that has Slate’s Edward McClelland rethinking his love of both his favorite team and the game itself. Verlander’s salary, and the rising salaries of other players, McClelland writes, “reveals everything that’s wrong with the American financial system.”

It doesn’t take long for McClelland to go off the rails, though, since his main thesis is quite misguided:

Over the past 40 years—the period of rising economic inequality that former Slate columnist Timothy Noah called “The Great Divergence”—Americans’ incomes have not grown at all, in real dollars. But baseball players’ incomes have increased twentyfold in real dollars: the average major-league salary in 2012 was $3,213,479. The income gap between ballplayers and their fans closely resembles the rising gap between CEOs and their employees, which grew during the same period from roughly 25-to-1 to 380-to-1.

Attempting to compare baseball players to CEOs gets wrong the dynamics of baseball’s labor market. Players aren’t CEOs — they don’t control the purse strings or the contracts or the benefits or the labor situation. They are the workers, the people on whose backs the company’s profits are built. There might be some argument in which comparing the growth in player salaries to the lack of growth in wages for the average worker is relevant, but it isn’t this one, because workers and players are ultimately on the same side of the equation.

Given that the most fundamental piece of McClelland’s argument is based on a fallacious comparison, it’s little surprise that he totally bungles the next point he tries to make:

I’m singling out professional athletes for my class envy because they’re the highest-profile beneficiaries of changes that have enriched those at the top of the economic order while impoverishing those at the bottom. The labor policies of the mid-20th century depressed the price of skilled labor while inflating the price of unskilled labor. Athletes’ bargaining power was constrained by the reserve clause, which tied a player’s rights to a single team for his entire career. At the other end of the labor market, unions represented 35 percent of private-sector workers and had their own political arm in the Democratic Party.

The deregulation of the American economy that began in the 1970s has increased the salaries of professional athletes enormously while reducing those of blue-collar workers. In 1975, pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos appealed to arbitrator Peter Seitz to strike down baseball’s reserve clause and allow them to sell their services to the highest bidder. The Seitz decision, which was upheld by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, began the era of free agency in professional sports. After increasing arithmetically for the first three-quarters of the century, salaries rose geometrically during the past 25 years of the 1900s and have continued to balloon in the 2000s.

Because the reserve clause was eliminated at the insistence of the Major League Baseball Players Association, the Seitz decision is considered a victory for organized labor. It wasn’t. It was a victory for the laissez-faire marketplace.

The Seitz decision is considered a victory for organized labor because it was a victory for organized labor. The reserve clause existed solely for the protection of ownership — baseball’s corporate class. It restricted player movement and suppressed salaries, since players couldn’t receive more than a set raise from their teams and couldn’t offer their services to other teams who might pay them more. It restricted worker rights and labor movement and kept the share of money players received artificially low, and the only reason it lasted as long as it did was because the federal government granted Major League Baseball an antitrust exemption that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1972.

The Seitz decision, though, gave baseball’s players — its working class — the right to negotiate fair salaries and the ability to gain a fairer share of the revenues and profits they helped create. Abolishing the clause gave the players a voice in the system and allowed them to share in the riches as baseball blossomed into a major business over the ensuing decades. It ushered in an era of unprecedented rights for ballplayers, something McClelland would seem to enjoy, given his concern for stagnant wages and declining unionzation rates for average workers even as the CEO class continues to prosper. Arguing that the reserve clause was a good thing that might need to make a comeback isn’t just the ultimate #slatepitch, it also undermines everything McClelland seems to be in favor of in the labor-business dynamic.

McClelland holds the belief, one with which I agree, that it is problematic that the wages of average workers have stagnated even as executive compensation has risen dramatically, and that the decline in unionization has played a major role in the struggles of the American worker over the last several decades. But baseball’s labor fights, and those in other sports, are similar in dynamic to labor fights at Caterpillar or ConEd or any other business, and rising baseball salaries (which, I might add, aren’t rising as a share of total revenues) are much closer to the ideal than the problem. A strong union has ensured that players are sharing in the prosperity they help create. The problem is that other workers haven’t been able to do the same.

One of the immediate discussions in the wake of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, particularly in the absence of more information about who might have committed these dreadful acts and what distorted reasoning they might offer for having done so, has been the question of how to handle marathons, which take up enormous amounts of public space and involve enormous numbers of spectators, in the future.

“Marathons are not events with X-ray machines and airtight security,” wrote Clare Malone at The American Prospect. “You cannot police every stretch of sidewalk, predict every plot, bomb-proof every trash can. So the worst part is again not knowing the where or the when.”

And at Grantland, Charles Pierce begins in the same place as Malone but comes to different conclusions—and gets at a larger issue. “Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles,” he wrote. “You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it. There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people’s houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.”

All of the things that could make marathons more secure would take enormous resources, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t feasible if municipalities are willing to spend resources to do them. Marathon organizers, in coordination with state and federal law enforcement, could run background checks on everyone trying to get race numbers in an effort to screen out anyone who might be attempting to get in order to place an explosive device or detonate a suicide bomb at the starting line, and could perform similar screenings of volunteers, staff, and medical professionals who provide support to the race. It would be extremely burdensome to do so, and local businesses and residents would be hysterical at the inconvenience, but local police could cordon off the race route for a radius of a block or so a week in advance of the race, search public receptacles, and either set up security checkpoints for spectators, or to ban spectators entirely. Start times could be staggered more to prevent concentrations of runners who would be vulnerable to mass casualties. But Lydia DePillis is right that there’s no way to make a marathon route as controlled an environment as a stadium.

But it’s worth asking several questions before making this decision, which has already faced the organizers of the London Marathon, which will be run this week as scheduled. Do we want to dramatically increase security at road races just because it’s theoretically possible to do so? What gain would we make in public safety, particularly in an era where terror targets have tended to shift as we’ve locked down different sectors of public life, in part with the goal of encouraging us to devote financial resources and emotional energy to locking down our public spaces, and in part because novelty is an effective ingredient in spreading fear? And what do we lose in closing a once-open public space that was the site of democratic and generous civic participation?
Read more

After two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon yesterday, we got a clinic in the weaknesses of cable news as a format for covering breaking disaster news. In the absence of new, verifiable information to report minute-by-minute, networks ended up airing the same footage repeatedly, with varying degrees of context, bringing on paid commentators from former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Jane Harman to disgraced former Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman to fill airspace with commentary whose value or lack thereof will only be discernible in retrospect, and breaking to news conferences from Boston public officials and a statement from President Obama. It’s difficult to pull together context pieces in the midst of breaking news, but certainly not impossible. These are five segments or pieces of information cable networks might have considered pushing aggressively as a means of providing historical or regional context on the story that would have informed developments when they became available:

1. Details on Boston’s hospital system and first response system: Early reports of death and injury tolls were distorted by a report, still not explained, from the New York Post, that 12 people had died in the marathon bombing. Currently, the death toll from the attack stands at three people. In the absence of verifiable information about the death and injury numbers from the attack, one useful piece of context for national audiences would have been an explanation of the size and resources of Boston’s hospital system, which is exceptional for a city of its size, and means that the city had strong resources to deal with a tragedy of this magnitude. Explaining what the city’s hospital network looks like, and that the support network for the marathon included many medical professionals and first responders, could have provided context for the area’s medical resources and helped audiences manage their expectation of the death and grievous injury toll.

2. Information on housing and people-finder efforts: It’s important for news networks to remember who their audiences are—and as marathon runners were concentrated in Boston’s downtown hotels and meetup areas to get them away from the blast site, and particularly as cell service went down in the area, the audience for cable news included them and their families. In events like these, and even in the absence of a tragedy, cable news is on heavy rotation in hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, and other public spaces. Regularly and clearly explaining how runners and their families could check in on the people-locator set up by Google, how they could access offers of housing by people in the New England area, and how businesses and residents could unlock their wireless networks to make them accessible to runners who’d lost cell signals or who hadn’t yet retrieved their checked bags and who didn’t have access to their phones again, would have been a significant public service.

3. Historical coverage of domestic terrorist attacks like the Atlanta and Oklahoma City bombings: In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Americans have become accustomed to quick, and verifiable, claims of responsibility for terrorist attacks, which was not forthcoming in Boston. Rather than treating those attacks as the only possible context for the Boston Marathon bombing, it would be useful to air short features on attacks like the Centennial Park bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, as a reminder that there are many motivations for acts of mass murder, and that the investigation might be extended. The Oklahoma City bombing timeline would be a useful reminder that there were multiple theories about who had committed the attacks, including international terrorists following up on the first World Trade Center bombing, a drug cartel targeting the Drug Enforcement Agency, and conspiracy theory-minded Christian fundamentalists. All of these theories turned out to be false. And the Centennial Park bombing is an important caution both of the dangers of early accusations—Richard Jewell, a security guard who discovered the Atlanta bomb, was slandered as a suspect—and of the fact that these investigations will not immediately produce culprits. Eric Rudolph, who committed the Olympics bombing, continued to carry out attacks until 1998, and wasn’t caught until 2003.
Read more