Tony Kornheiser, Jeanne McManus lament death of Washington Post sports section: ‘Like a knife in your heart’

The many eulogies and angry missives that have been written about the death knell of the Washington Post’s sports desk this week have been chock-full of the names of some of the most important sportswriters and reporters of the last century.

Tony Kornheiser is best known for his work with ESPN, briefly as a Monday Night Football analyst and as one of the longtime co-hosts of Pardon the Interruption. But Kornheiser made his mark at the Washington Post (along with PTI co-host Michael Wilbon). He joined the prestigious paper in 1979, became a full-time sports columnist in 1984, and became a mainstay of their coverage until leaving in 2008.

While neither he nor Wilbon mentioned the depressing news of Washington Post layoffs that included much of the sports section on PTI, the two have saved their harshest critiques for the podcasts.

Kornheiser opened Friday’s episode of The Tony Kornheiser Show with a discussion about the Post layoffs and sports desk shuttering with former longtime WaPo editor Jeanne McManus. They both shared frustration not only with the decision but also with the lack of clarity about where the Post goes from here.

“Here’s the question I keep asking: What’s the plan?” asked McManus. “It’s been called, I think, by Will Lewis, a strategic reset. What does that mean? Does it mean you want to be the Wall Street Journal? Does it mean you want to be Politico? I don’t get it. And there’s lots of conspiratorial thoughts. I know we think that way because we’re journalists. But if this were motivated solely by Trump, why didn’t they kill the national staff who’s been just bearing down on him, who have been doing wonderful, assertive reporting on the Trump administration?”

Kornheiser focused on what the decision means as someone who couldn’t imagine a major city like Washington, D.C., lacking a dedicated sports desk covering it.

“My first response is, of course, I worked there, and I worked in newspapers… All I ever wanted to do in my life is go to games and write about them. That was exactly the way I felt and just wanted to be a newspaper sports writer. I just felt, Well, how could you do this? How could you get rid of a sports section, a unifying thing in a city? Politics is divisive and sports is unifying, and people go to the sports section. Even if they’re not sports fans, they go to the sports section.

“If you lived in Washington, DC, I was amazed when I came down here a million years ago, what a hold the Washington football team had on the city, how important it was to every strata in the city. And that import is still there. It’s certainly there. It was awakened not this past season, but the season before when they had a really a good season. And people come in from New England, and they come in from the Wall Street Journal, and they come in from California, and then they just say, ‘Yeah, we’re just going to throw this thing out. We’re going to throw the sports section out. We’re going to throw the Metro section out.’

“I’m going to paraphrase [David] Remnick here because Remnick is smarter than I am. He said the job of the Metro section is to put the mayor in jail if he or she deserves it. I said, the job of the sports section is to fire the coach if he deserves it. That’s the job. Now that’s not there.

“There’s this huge trade, Anthony Davis, who I don’t think will ever play a minute in Washington, but okay. But he gets traded here. It’s covered by wires. This would be an A1 story. It’s an A1 story, right?”

“To have something covered by the wires, it’s just like a knife in your heart to see that,” replied McManus, “with all due respect to wire reporters.”

“Look, I loved it, and you loved it, and I grew up wanting to be on a newspaper, and now I face the reality that the capital the United States of America does not have a newspaper. It just does not. Not a full newspaper,” replied Kornheiser. I would ask you… Where are the next papers coming from or are there no papers? Does everything go online without any particular standard of how you express your opinion, because anybody has access to the internet? What’s next?”

McManus didn’t think a new newspaper would rise to replace the Washington Post, but she admitted there is “a void” she hopes can be filled.

“Somebody, I would think, could dive into that abyss and come up with some kind of digital option for us,” she said. “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know where their money is. But if there is such a person, I would hope they would hire all of our dear friends who have lost their jobs.”