No one can really question Naomi Osaka’s decision not to participate in post-match press conferences. It doesn’t matter what the terms of her engagement with the French Open or any other WTA event are. It’s a mental health issue. It’s her mind, and she’s right to want to protect it.
However, is it right to label the media as the bad guy in this tradeoff between a sports personality’s right to mental health, the public’s access to news and the sports sponsors’ right to get a return on their investment?
In this age of corporate sport, post-tournament press conferences are one of the few platforms upon which media and sports personalities can interact. Most popular sports are proprietary events now, with organizers limiting access to venues, content, and personalities only to chosen media houses, leaving the others to buy, borrow or steal copyright content. These pressers are the nearest a journalist will get to a top sports personality aside from watching him/her come and go in the hotel lobby.
While Naomi Osaka’s discomfort with probing questions is very likely genuine, modern tournament press conferences tend to be chaperoned affairs. There’s always a moderator, or even the sportsperson’s media rep, close at hand to step in if things become awkward. Also, most journalists adhere to an unwritten code to not cross the fine line between the probing question and the invasive one. Questions can be challenging, but the the player is at liberty to dismiss a query with a firm ‘Next!’.
However, press conferences are never only about the game that was played or the one coming up. If there’s an off-tournament occurrence providing context to the match, journalists do ask the player to relate to it. If the player had had a road accident in the run-up to the tournament, there’s always a reporter who’ll ask, “How fit are you for this match? Do you feel you can take (the next opponent) on?”
The modern day sports stars have help teams who prep her/him for harder challenges than that, so a reporter’s stock-in-trade questions is hardly likely to unsettle anyone.
However, analyses of Naomi Osaka’s decision to stay away from the media have tended to portray the press as a pack of hounds ready to pounce on a vulnerable athlete for the prurient consumption of the public. The more fanciful of these analyses paint journalists as vultures profiting from a poor athletes’ mental distress. That’s hardly likely. The poorly paid average hack is likely to file his report, leave it to the mercies of his editor and go home to worry how much longer his job will last. No reporter is likely to impress his hard-boiled editor with the clever questions he’s just asked at the end-of-day–yawn, yawn–press conference. Nor is the media house going to profit from content that’s available to all the wire agencies and therefore to every publication in the world.
Bu then, why is the French Open and WTA imposing a stiff penalty on Osaka for reneging on her media obligations? The truth is not that the tournament organizers are beholden to the media. The truth is that they are obligated to the big companies that bankroll the event, cough up the prize money, etc.
For allowing media to access the sports personality at the press centre, tournament organizers get a payoff in the form of background advertising, brand association, etc. This can be substantial. The media get little from the post-match pressers in fact, except some inanities, which would be available from the sports star’s social media accounts anyway.
So the very purpose of Jose Mourinho’s post-match interview are the dozens of sponsor logos you see on the screen behind him. That’s likely part of a contractual obligation between Sky, the broadcast rights owner, and the Premier League. Not a favour to you and me, or to the thousands of other media outlets that pay Sky to let them use a bit of that footage.
This complex of issues is a product of the proprietary capture of popular sport by the coalition of sports federations, sports star management agencies, brands and large corporate media. Mental health issues are a byproduct of this phenomenon.
A sports star who excuses oneself from post-match pressers cops a penalty for depriving the advertiser/sponsors of a brand opportunity. Not because a great public purpose has been injured. Not because a baying media has been denied.
Another angle to this is the corporatization of sports personalities themselves. Most popular sports stars today are monetizable entities off court. Their behaviour, their clothing, their business engagement, their entire narrative and persona is counseled and controlled by management professionals a view to enhancing his/her endorsement value. Increasingly, sports stars have large Twitter, FB and Instagram followings which they monetize. And the monies are handsome, dwarfing tournament prize money.
And besides being lucrative, these platforms have the advantage of being nonaccountable platforms. Messaging on social media can be outsourced to trained communication pros. There are no journalists asking probing questions there. Noisome trolls can be blocked, only fawning questions can be fielded.
Maybe this is really what sports personalities want. A one-way communication platform upon which they get to control the narrative and make money from the following?
Naomi Osaka’s narrative that media are the sole source of her mental health issues is specious. Such problems arise from social media accounts as well—much more viciously due to trolling. The online abuse being faced by black football players is an instance of how much more serious this problem can be.
Osaka’s desire to put distance between her and the media is part of a global phenomenon of public personalities, even governments and associations to put themselves beyond the reach of the public. It is a desire for non-accountability.
None of this is to say that Ms. Osaka’s discomfort is not real. The hefty penalty imposed upon her is unreasonable, whatever the tournament rules say. The fact remains that by deigning to put in an appearance, sports personalities do no favour to the media, or to the public who are served by the media.
As the English Premier League is discovering, the presence of spectators, and by extension the sport loving public, adds real value to the sports experience. The player, the organizer, the sponsor, the media, and the audience all have their role to play in sport. The absence of any one of these ingredients robs it of the essence of sport.
Image: Screen-grab from a Naomi Osaka press conference after winning the US Open in 2019
The author, Ram Karan, is a seasoned journalist, passionate lover of sport and keen observer of society at large.
