Sports media is about to help FIFA gaslight the planet

Sports media is about to help FIFA gaslight the planet

The tournament should have been postponed. Instead, the media machine is polishing the brand and pretending not to see the blood.
There was never a chance that Washington’s man in FIFA, football’s world governing body, was going to do the right thing and postpone the World Cup. Nor that he would strip the US and Canada of hosting rights after their attack on Iran. The FIFA president, Lebanese-Swiss Gianni Infantino, is doing what’s right for his sport, his ‘shareholders’, and a compliant sports media will assist the most bigly sportswashing psy-op ever. 
Sports media, no fur coat and no underwearThe term fanboys/girls with laptops is attributed to our former Capital Sports guest, Irish journalist Paul Kimmage. The ex-pro cyclist ‘spat in the soup’ of the sport he loved by exposing rampant doping in ‘Rough Ride’, to date, the finest sports book ever written. His target: the press pass wearing, goodie bag hungry mob of oddballs so in thrall to the stars they report on, that no crime or offence can be mentioned.
The nub is that the majority of these folks, who exist in every media outlet’s sports department in every country, were the last kids picked for teams in school. Devoid of sports ability (they believed), they vicariously live sporting lives by following their heroes and quietly going weak at the knees when Cristiano Ronaldo, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, or Maria Sharapova, cast a smile their way.
Some have landed top media management spots in FIFA, from where they dispense largesse [access and goodie bags] to those desperate to be favored. And media organizations, in order to ensure their reporters and commentators are granted permission to cover the World Cup, will ‘play ball’. What FIFA wants, FIFA gets, and the media will give it up happily.
Selling out to avoid missing outIt’s been interesting to witness my peers brag about covering this upcoming ‘show’. From LinkedIn to Instagram, so many decent folk are making sure everyone knows they’re going to the World Cup and their previous posts critiquing US or Israeli military adventures, or indeed FIFA, have either been edited or removed.
I asked one woman, who will work with a European broadcaster, where was her excellent takedown of the awarding of the FIFA Peace Prize to US President Donald Trump? It had garnered hundreds of likes and comments on LinkedIn, yet, had vanished.
My agent, she replied, with a smiley face emoji, explaining that they were warned that any social media posts critical of the US or US government could mean a refusal at border control.
I guess I was lucky that I turned down the chance to work at the event, though my decision was formed pre-Iran attacks. I couldn’t morally perform a Men in Black on my brain and scrub my social media, articles, broadcasts, and soul clean.
Read more One football writer I expected to take a stand was Alexander Abnos, a senior sports editor with The Guardian US. With the anti-ICE protests in his nation as a background, he wrote that the US is not fit to stage soccer’s showpiece event. He signed off with it would be hard to argue if the World Cup was moved out of the US entirely.
Here was a man with backbone, courage, someone I could relate to. Okay, the headline was weak as English tea (). And then, he turned full fanboy!
– Messi, mascots, tickets and Trump: 48 questions for the 48-team World Cup (April 1)
– Lionel Messi exits Miami game before World Cup with possible injury (May 25)
– World Cup 2025: a visual guide to the stadiums across the trio of host nations (June 1)
And he outdid himself, also on June 1, with a real doozy to show he was chugging the FIFA Kool Aid: Gathered around a laptop, the USMNT create their World Cup journey’s first memeable moment.
Alexander is not the worst, he’s just an example of what was already underway before the June 11 kick-off &n