Mullin’s article doesn’t exactly line up with my recollection of how sports reporters worked

It would likely be very different if you lived in NYC/ LA/ SF or anywhere that had something going on besides sports. In places like Ohio, local teams are often a central defining factor in civic and personal identity. If all that you have besides your shitty factory job or your unemployment check is a very successful high school football team, your priorities can get pretty bent.

That said, their criticisms had more to do with idiotic decisions by team managers and coaches, sub-par performance by the athletes, and the avarice and arrogant incompetence of team owners than it did about higher-stakes issues like sexual harassment and criminal-level corruption. And maybe it was just the reporters I worked with, who were older established guys working in a large market. I do remember there was one sports reporter at a rival outlet they never tired of mocking for the sloppy wet kisses and softball questions he gave to anyone whose team gave him access, but I figured he was an exception.

In any case, Brown is correct: a professional journalist (which Autullo and Brown both are, being paid to write) not only respects the wishes of his sources regarding anonymity when possible but also attempts to get all sides of the story, not just the side of those that your access gatekeepers who will go on record want to present. I understand the defensiveness of those working in a distressed industry like newspapers, but in 2013 the idea that putting one’s story on newsprint instead of pixels makes it more valid journalism is a bit silly.

Fixed.

…oh, the Toledo Blade does?  Oh.

And yet read the press, and he’s a Saint because Walsh, not DeBartolo, built the 49ers into a great organization.

In Scottish Football, this is called “succulent lamb journalism” after a famously   obsequious article, fulsome in its praise of a club’s plans and the meal the club gave to the writer.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succulent_lamb

Despite that article being 14 years old now the phrase and the scandal lives on, with the same journalist in the spotlight this week for passing articles to club owners for prior approval.