I love sports. If you read my newsletter regularly, you’ve probably figured that out. I’m a former sports columnist and I enjoy writing often about sports media in this newsletter.

I say all this as a way to emphasize that I follow sports closely and I’d like to think I know what I’m talking about. And I will tell you that I can’t remember the last time an athlete has captured the imagination of sports followers quite like Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark.

She’s a star. A basketball star. And a big-time TV star, the kind of star that single-handedly moves the needle when it comes to TV viewership. People tune in just to watch her — her shooting impossibly long three-point shots, dishing out perfect passes and basically carrying herself as if the game was invented for the sole purpose of letting her show off. And I mean that in the most complimentary way — her swagger is as fun to watch as her shooting.

This past Sunday, in the final home game of her college career, Clark scored her 3,668th point to pass the legendary Pete Maravich for the most points for any player, man or woman, in Division I basketball history. That’s an impressive number, of course. But here are two more numbers that might be just as impressive:

3.9 million and 4.4 million.

The 3.9 million is the average number of TV viewers who watched the Iowa-Ohio State showdown game on Fox. The game peaked with 4.4 million viewers. A Sunday afternoon game. It turned out to be the most-watched women’s game in 25 years.

It’s called the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”

More people watched Iowa beat Ohio State, a matchup of the No. 6 and No. 2 teams in the country at the time, than watched a marquee NBA game between the Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors that also was on Sunday. (Granted, that game was a blowout, but still.)

Axios sports reporter Kendall Baker tweeted that the average college basketball TV viewership on Fox this season for men’s games was 946,000. For women? It was 981,000. Baker added that women’s hoops viewership is up 48% on Fox this season and up 60% across all national networks.

That’s all due to Clark.

Follow this story to see just how much Clark means to TV and college basketball:

Clark actually has another year of college eligibility left, but has already said she will enter the professional WNBA. Some wondered if Clark might be better off staying in school since college athletes can be paid for their name, image and likeness. Turns out, she’s better off going pro because she gets paid and she’ll still rack up endorsements.

However, Puck’s John Ourand reported that Fox tried to get inventive as a way to keep her in college so she could continue providing record-breaking TV numbers. Fox airs women’s college basketball, but it doesn’t carry WNBA games. Ourand wrote, “Clark is such ratings gold, in fact, that Fox executives contemplated reaching out to other networks to see if they could come up with an enticing (name, image and likeness) offer that would convince her to stay in the college ranks for one more season. Alas, talks never materialized (nobody ever approached Clark), and ended before they could get going last week, when the superstar formally announced that she was headed to the WNBA next season. She is the overwhelming favorite to be the top overall pick.”

OK, it didn’t happen, but a TV network paying to have an athlete stay in school raises all kinds of ethical questions. Still, it is fascinating that Fox, according to Ourand, kicked around an idea to keep Clark in school.

Ourand wrote in his piece, “I was chatting with a top executive as we tried to recall the last athlete to have this sort of impact on their entire sport. The best we could come up with was … Tiger Woods.”

Next up for Clark will be the NCAA Tournament. Iowa is currently ranked third, so they are in the running to be a Final Four team. Anything short of that might be considered a major disappointment for her, Iowa, college basketball fans and, yes, ABC/ESPN, which carries the tournament.

Say again?

Fox News host Bill Hemmer took issue with how other cable news networks cover former President Donald Trump. Specifically, Hemmer was riled up that Fox News’ “competitors” (I assume he means CNN and MSNBC) sometimes don’t carry Trump’s speeches after primaries or, for example, Monday’s Supreme Court decision that allowed him to stay on the ballot in Colorado. (Hemmer was not talking about Trump rallies, to be clear.) Hat tip to Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr for pointing out this story.

Hemmer said on Tuesday’s “Outnumbered,” “You know, during our primary coverage tonight, if Joe Biden, as president of the United States decided he want to come out and take a speech, we would take his speech. We would listen to what he has to say. But on primary night after primary night, our competition sometimes refuses to take the winner. South Carolina was a big deal, it was a big vote, it told us a lot about where the Republican Party is going in this candidacy. One of our competitors took four minutes, another took 10. If that’s what you’re going to do, take news out of your name. Because we should all be listening to these ideas and thoughts. And if Biden came out we would take him and be fair to his message.”

Oh, this is rich. A Fox News person suggested another cable network take the word “news” out of their name because they, according to him, aren’t being fair.

The real reason CNN and MSNBC often cut away from Trump’s rambling speeches is to fact-check him, since he often lies about things such as the 2020 election.

Speaking of Fox News …

There was an exchange earlier this week on Fox News that also gained some attention. Appearing on Fox News, Jonathan Kott, a former aide to West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, defended President Joe Biden, saying, “I will say this: I would rather have a president who maybe has a stutter once in a while than one who spews conspiracy theory, racist nonsense and has dinner with Nazis.”

Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce, who was also on the segment with host Harris Faulkner, said, “We just heard him call a number of Republicans Nazis and racists, so I think we can put him in the category of willing to go there.”

Kott responded with, “I didn’t — hold on. I didn’t call Republicans Nazis. I said he had dinner with a Nazi.”

There was more to the exchange.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, “Kott wasn’t simply pulling accusations out of a hat, however. Contrary to Bruce’s assertion, he was referring to one specific moment: Trump’s sitting down for dinner with the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes in November 2022. He wasn’t calling Republicans racists and Nazis, he was using the former term to describe some of Trump’s rhetoric and the latter to refer to a specific individual.”

Then Bump added, “If Bruce’s main source of news is right-wing media like Fox News, though, she might never have heard about that dinner. In November and the first half of December of 2022, the incident was mentioned in 89 segments on CNN and more than twice that number on MSNBC. On Fox, though? It was only mentioned seven times, total.”

Bump also pointed out other times that stories considered to be negative of Trump didn’t get the same amount of coverage on Fox News as it did on CNN and MSNBC. Examples include lawsuits filed by E. Jean Carroll against Trump, mentions of the House select committee created to investigate the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, just to name a few.

Oh, one more …

TV host Piers Morgan, shown here in 2019. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

One more that’s kinda-sorta Fox News-related. CNN’s Jon Passantino and Oliver Darcy reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News, has pulled the plug on a right-wing talk network in the United Kingdom called TalkTV. Passantino and Darcy wrote it was a “blow to the media mogul who launched the opinion-focused venture just two years ago with an aim of replicating the success of Fox News in the UK.”

The network will shut down this summer, according to a memo obtained by CNN.

Passantino and Darcy wrote, “After building a global newspaper empire and witnessing the ratings and profits success of the right-wing Fox News Channel in the US, Murdoch sought to break into the UK television business, replicating the opinion-driven talk format. But the outlet, which launched in 2022 with a roster of high-profile hosts, struggled to build an audience, failing to rival established centrist news outlets like the BBC and Sky News.”

In the memo, TalkTV president of broadcasting Scott Taunton wrote, “A large proportion of our live viewing is already through streaming on televisions and we intend to continue to grow this. Clips will continue to be shared through social media. There is no doubt over Talk’s future as an audio and video channel, it just won’t be distributed on linear.”

Piers Morgan had been one of the on-air personalities for TalkTV, but he recently announced that he was taking his “Uncensored” show to YouTube. He told Semafor’s Ben Smith at the time, “I’ve just decided that I no longer want to create my show for linear television — I just want to go full digital globally. There’s something quite anachronistic about a show like mine still trying to create old fashioned TV for a pre-scheduled time slot each night for a relatively small audience — when we’re getting such gigantic audiences digitally.”

Sheriff vs. newspaper

Troublesome story out of Volusia County, Florida. At least twice now, the Daytona Beach News-Journal was not alerted to notable news conferences being held by Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood. On Feb. 28, Chitwood held a press conference about the location of the remains of a 16-year-old girl. The news conference was announced on social media, but the paper was not given a heads up as is typically custom.

Frank Fernandez of the News-Journal wrote, “Chitwood’s media staff did not send an announcement to The News-Journal about the time and place of the briefing nor did it respond to emails and a text to spokesman Andrew Gant inquiring about the briefing.”

Two local TV stations were at the press conference, but Fernandez wrote that it wasn’t immediately clear how they learned about it. In an Orlando Sentinel editorial last year that was critical of the sheriff, Gant said, “The News-Journal has the same access to that as anybody else. They just don’t have exclusive access.”

News-Journal executive editor John Dunbar said, “It is difficult to show up at a news conference that we don’t know about.”

As I mentioned, this wasn’t the first time something like this happened. Last October, the News-Journal was not invited to a news conference to announce the arrest of a 17-year-old who is alleged to have sold a fatal dose of fentanyl to another teen.

When asked by Dunbar about the possible oversight, Gant said, “No oversight, sorry. The sheriff is no longer inviting the NJ to his news conference or commenting for stories. This one’s available online for anyone to see, though.”

According to Fernandez’s story for the News-Journal, the sheriff has been upset with the paper over its coverage of a 14-year-old who was accused of shooting at deputies. The case of the 14-year-old was set for adult court and she eventually reached a plea deal to serve 20 years in prison. A 12-year-old who was with her had his case in juvenile court, where a deputy showed up at his sentencing and forgave him.

Apparently, Chitwood has complained about other stories, as well.

Fernandez wrote, “Chitwood posts his criticism on his Facebook page, where most of his followers back him unquestionably. Chitwood has also used his social media presence to criticize the paper for stories that haven’t even been published.”

Chitwood may take out his anger on the News-Journal, but really, it’s the News-Journal’s readers — the people of Volusia County — who suffer.

Down goes Meta

An image of the Facebook app on a phone taken in October 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, were down for a spell for some on Tuesday, leaving thousands unable to log into their accounts.

The Washington Post’s Naomi Nix and Will Oremus wrote, “Facebook and Meta users started seeing problems around 10 a.m. Eastern time, based on reports to Downdetector.com, a site that tracks online glitches. The issues peaked with more than 570,000 Facebook users and more than 90,000 Instagram users reporting outages at roughly 10:30 a.m. The total number of people affected probably was higher, because Downdetector tracks only users who take the time to file a report on the site.”

By early afternoon, the issue seemed to have been resolved. Meta hasn’t said anything publicly, other than it was a “technical issue.”

X owner Elon Musk took the opportunity to poke fun at his rival while it was down, tweeting, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”

Media tidbits

• C-SPAN co-CEOs Rob Kennedy and Susan Swain, who have been at the top of the cable network since 2012, are both stepping down this year. Kennedy, who has been with C-SPAN since 1987, will retire in May. Swain, who has been with the network since 1982 and is also an on-air host, doesn’t have a set date for her retirement. She will stay on to help with the transition. A search firm will help find a new CEO.
• The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies with “NY Times Boss Defends Israel-Gaza Coverage: We’ll ‘Never Win Over The Partisans.’”
• Noah Shachtman, who recently stepped down as editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone after two-and-a-half years, is joining Wired as a contributing editor. He also is the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. Shachtman worked as a freelancer and then editor at Wired in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• Good stuff for Nieman Lab from Jon Marcus: “Generation #Branded. More newsroom jobs are requiring influencer-type skills. Journalism schools are adapting.”
• NBC Sports’ Kathryn Tappen is joining NHL Network as a studio host and reporter. She will continue her role at NBC, where she is a sideline reporter on college football. When NBC had the rights to the NHL, Tappen was a studio host for the network’s hockey coverage. She has worked at NHL Network before — from 2011 to 2015.
• A little inside industry news here: NBC News communications veteran Richard Hudock has been promoted to vice president of communications at MSNBC. He will be in charge of communications for all of MSNBC’s programming and principal communications lead for MSNBC president Rashida Jones. Variety’s Brian Steinberg has more.

Hot type

• The New York Times’ Tracey Tully with “The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping: A Grisly Theory and a Renewed Debate.”
• The Wall Street Journal’s Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson with “‘Mayday!’ Three Hours of Panic on the Red Sea.”

More resources for journalists

• Subscribe to Poynter’s Friday newsletter, Open Tabs with Poynter managing editor Ren LaForme, and get behind-the-scenes stories only available to subscribers.
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• Get the edge on reporting on the seven hot topics of the 2024 election with Beat Academy (webinar series) — Rolling enrollment from now through September. Enroll today.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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