Let me do a reset on an event from last week that attracted a lot of coverage:
- The NY Post published pictures of Pats’ coach Mike Vrabel in a hot tub with NFL Inisder, Dianna Russini, at a “couples retreat” in Arizona.
- The pictures were supposedly taken by someone who is not a paparazzi nor is he/she associated with a professional photo agency. The motivation for the “release” of the photos was a payment labeled as “four figures”. Maybe all that is correct; maybe not.
- Internet hilarity ensued and too many people made this into a story of gargantuan proportion.
With the benefit of a weekend of hindsight, let me try to be rational about this. I will dismiss entirely any conspiracy theory that has as part of its foundation that the pictures were deepfakes created by some AI routine. That would be an assertion that needs a wealth of critical evidence not something that can merely be held up to be true and therefore something else must logically follow from it. Moreover, any such thinking also would create a motivation dimension; who “ordered” the deepfake and why?
The pictures that I believe to be real ones are clearly out of the ordinary; Dianna Russini is employed by The Athletic which in turn is owned by the NY Times. With that lineage, it is not outrageous to label her as a “sports journalist” and the common working model for “journalist” and “person covered by said journalist” does not include hob-knobbing in a hot tub. Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that I assume there is/was more to the event than was revealed in the picture, let me make something very clear:
- I do not care for a moment if Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini have been playing “hide the sausage” in the past or the present or the future. If in fact any putative such activity may exist, as long as it is consensual I don’t care. I also don’t care if it is transactional.
The Athletic has an interesting situation before it. Dianna Russini is someone who gets a lot of media attention on TV and on Sports Radio around the country based on her reporting in The Athletic and her reputation as an “insider”. She is a valuable asset to The Athletic and I am not the least bit surprised that the folks in charge there have resisted so far, the knee-jerk calls for her to be fired for unprofessional behavior.
There was a situation that was sort of analogous to this one in Indiana a couple of years ago. When Caitlin Clark was drafted by the Indiana Fever after her collegiate stardom, she arrived in town and there was a “Welcome to Indy” press event. A columnist for the Indianapolis Star, attended that event and flashed a “heart sign” with his hands toward Clark and said something like – – this is a paraphrase from memory:
- Send one of these back to me and we will get along just fine.
The Internet went nuts over that one too. That columnist was not fired; he was disciplined by the newspaper in that he was not allowed to cover Caitlin Clark or write about her; however, he remained in his columnist position with the paper. [Aside: He is still with the Indy Star today several years after that clumsy exchange with Caitlin Clark.]
The Athletic will probably need to find some sort of discipline to effect in this matter but firing Dianna Russini seems overboard to me for the moment. Firing her would make sense if and when the following set of events might happen:
- A major story involving the Pats breaks and Dianna Russini comes by some pertinent “inside information” completely independent of Mike Vrabel.
- People react negatively to her reporting with a memory of these photos by jumping to the salacious conclusion there.
- People then extend their negative feelings from Dianna Russini to The Athletic itself.
- If things ever get to that state of affairs …
Another “Internet aspect” of the hot tub incident has been an attempt somehow to connect it to the incident of Pats’ owner Robert Kraft and his dalliance in Florida with a massage provider who may indeed have provided a very specific massage technique. Personally, I think those two things are as closely related as are the Loch Ness Monster and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
Here is my bottom line:
- Even if the “hot tub encounter” is absolutely the full extent of the interaction there and if the encounter was part of an interview process for a major story release by Dianna Russini, it was unseemly at best and unabashedly unprofessional.
- Any/All of Russini’s reporting on things involving the Pats will likely be given the “side-eye” by a large segment of football fandom.
- How fans react to the rest of her “insider” reporting remains to be seen and – – I believe – – is the critical factor in her continuing to be considered a source of pertinent reporting.
- As to Mike Vrabel, he had the Pats deep in the playoffs last season; as long as he does things like that with the team, he will weather this storm.
Finally, I close on a lighter note today with this from Rodney Dangerfield:
“I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports……….