“I just wanted to tell you congratulations on your success, young man. You hold your head up, alright? You guys have had a most magnificent season and you did a great job out there today. So you just hold your head up. Ladies and gentlemen DUUUVALL! You the one, alright? You keep it going, we got another season. Take care and much continued success to you and the entire team.”
That’s what Lynn Jones-Turpin, a reporter for the Jacksonville Free Press, said when she got the microphone at the postgame press conference after the Jacksonville Jaguars suffered a heartbreaking, last-minute wild-card loss to the Buffalo Bills. Jaguars head coach Liam Coen smiled and said “thank you, ma’am.” The clip went viral. People called it the best moment of the NFL weekend. Great for sports. A breath of fresh air.
Finally! A reporter who gets it.
A month earlier, the Seattle Kraken locked reporters out of a press conference entirely. After a loss during a stretch where Seattle lost 9 out of their previous 10, the Kraken held (what we thought would be) their normal postgame press conference. Instead, only a team employee was permitted to ask questions of coach Lane Lambert and staged a 57-second Q&A while the assembled media watched on in bewilderment. The reaction was immediate and it was not positive.
“A terrible look from any angle.” “No accountability.” Before the night was even over, I had a Kraken employee reaching out to me on the phone apologizing for what happened and assuring me that this would never happen again.
Both times, the microphone wasn’t being used for questions. In December, that was the team’s fault. On Sunday, it was the reporter’s choice. Both raised the same question: what is the role of credentialed media, and what are press conferences for?
Coen’s team went from 4-13 to 13-4, the best turnaround in franchise history, and now it was over. He was standing at the podium trying to hold in his emotions. But instead of another question about what went wrong, Jones-Turpin just tells him he did a good job. That she’s proud of him. That the city is proud of him. He smiles and says, “Thank you, ma’am..”
Sports are brutal and the press conference after a playoff loss usually serves as an autopsy. Instead, we got a moment of grace. Jones-Turpin offering kindness when everyone else was ready to pick apart what went wrong felt human in a context that usually doesn’t.
The intent was kind and the impact of that kindness is very real. But underneath is a principle: press conferences exist so reporters can ask questions. This wasn’t just shared as a sweet moment, but rather presented as a correction to what sports media should be. It was shared as proof that the normal way is broken, and that asking questions is really what’s wrong with sports media. Kindness and journalism are opposites, and it’s time to pick a side because we’re at war.
The Kraken, on the other hand, were not trying to be kind. They were eschewing accountability during a losing streak. Jones-Turpin was being kind to a coach who looked like he needed it. One felt evasive, while the other felt warm. The Kraken wouldn’t let reporters ask questions. Jones-Turpin chose not to.
Lynn Jones-Turpin isn’t a fan who snuck in. She’s a journalist with more than 25 years of credentials, and anyone calling her “fake media” is wrong. But “we got another season” is fan language. “Duuuval, you the one” is more a rallying cry from the stands, not the sort of thing you usually hear at a press podium. She had access to the microphone because she’s a reporter, but chose to use it like a fan.
If she wanted to give Coen a moment to breathe and to acknowledge the season before dissecting the loss, a question could do that just as well:
- Coach, what do you want this city to remember about this team?
- Coach, a year ago this team won four games. Looking back on the season, what are you most proud of?
- Coach, what would you tell your players about what you have built?
These questions let Coen take it wherever he wants, whether that’s the hurt he’s feeling, the pride in the turnaround, or something else. And crucially, the coach is the one saying it, not the reporter. The warmth and humanity is still there, but the reporter is facilitating the coach’s reflection, not delivering a statement or pep talk.
That distinction matters. It’s not about tough questions versus soft ones. The microphone is for questions, period. Soft questions, hard questions, silly questions, frivolous questions, but always still questions. The reporter opens the door and the subject decides what’s behind it.
A statement doesn’t allow any room. “Coach, you’re amazing, keep your head up” has exactly one socially acceptable response: “thank you.” The reporter becomes the content, and the coach becomes a prop. Questions extract while statements inject. The reporter’s job is to create space for the subject to fill, not to fill the space themselves.
There’s also a distinction between kindness as a private act versus kindness as content. The credential gives you access to the building. She could have pulled him aside afterward and said the same thing, human to human. That version would be for him. The moment you say something at a microphone with cameras rolling, it becomes content, whether she intended it or not. It becomes something millions of people consume and interpret and use as evidence for what they already believe. The question isn’t whether she was sincere. I absolutely, 100% with all my heart think she was. The question is whether sincerity at the microphone serves the same purpose as sincerity in the hallway.
The journalists who criticized Jones-Turpin mostly said some version of “that’s not what press conferences are for.” ESPN Steelers reporter Brooke Pryor: “It’s a kind sentiment, but it’s not the job of a reporter to console a coach. Pressers are to ask questions.”
That’s the same thing that made the Kraken situation feel wrong: the microphone is for questions. But with Jones-Turpin, people didn’t hear “the microphone is for questions.” They heard an attack on kindness.
- “Why are you criticizing someone for being a good person?”
- “Of all the hills to die on.”
- “Reporters are insufferable.”
It’s understandable. It sounds like people are being shallow and pedantic when something warm just happened. Coen was upset and someone was nice to him and you want to complain about protocol??
The fan belief makes sense on the surface: reporters should represent us, we’re the audience, we love this team. But the team already has people who speak for the team. They have a PR department, a website, a communications strategy, a whole media relations team. If reporters also become cheerleaders, there’s no independent voice left. What reporters actually provide is information the team doesn’t want to give you. Cheerleaders don’t ask those questions.
Asking questions isn’t “tearing down.” Coen knows what a press conference is. He’s done hundreds of them. Questions aren’t attacks. “Why did you go for it on fourth down?” is a question about football. Lane Lambert doesn’t experience “why did you scratch Tye Kartye today?” as an assault on his humanity. He experiences it as his job. Coaches and players aren’t victims of the press conference. They are professionals doing the accountability part of their jobs, same as the reporter.
The reporter asking questions serves the fans’ interest more than the cheerleader does, even if the cheerleader feels more aligned with fans. Is the team lying about an injury? Is ownership about to move the franchise? Did they cover up an assault? What happened in that hotel room that caused a star winger not to show up to a playoff game? The cheerleader doesn’t get you those answers, but the reporter asking uncomfortable questions does.
Teams are already testing what they can get away with. In September, Mark Lazerus from The Athletic asked Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Noah Hanifin about the team potentially signing Carter Hart, the goalie at the center of the 2018 Hockey Canada sexual assault case. Hanifin answered without incident. Then the Golden Knights’ PR staff pulled Lazerus out of the room, revoked his credential, and told him to leave the building. They said he had “ambushed” Hanifin.
The question Lazerus asked was legitimate. Hart’s potential signing was newsworthy, Hanifin was a reasonable person to ask, and the answer matters to fans who care about what their team stands for. But the Golden Knights decided that asking it at all was a violation. The message they were sending was we will revoke your access if you raise something we don’t want raised.
If the culture shifts to believe that asking hard questions is inherently cruel, teams get more cover to do exactly what the Golden Knights did. The Kraken locked reporters out and faced immediate backlash. But what happens when a team can frame removing a reporter as protecting a player from an “ambush?” What happens when fans have been primed to see questions as attacks? You don’t even have to say “we are silencing journalists” anymore. You can, instead, take the PR spin of “not allowing questions is enforcing kindness.”
One of the most true things about human nature is that people respond to incentives, and when a reporter sees that statements of encouragement get millions of views while questions get you labeled a hater, the equation starts to shift, little by little. Norms shift when exceptions get celebrated and the rule becomes seen as the violation. Now there’s a viral clip that reinforces exactly what many fans already believed: that the media should be unabashed cheerleaders, and that doing the actual job is an attack.
Once the frame is “kindness vs. cruelty,” any articulation of “here’s what the job is” sounds like you’re arguing against kindness. There’s no way to say “press conferences are for questions” without sounding like the villain. The discourse is now structured so that any defense of the norm confirms the accusation.
Jones-Turpin did something kind. She also gave a lot of people permission to believe that what reporters normally do is cruel.
The argument that reporters should be cheerleaders isn’t just fan sentiment; it’s being made by people with massive platforms.
McAfee made the subtext explicit. “Their days are numbered,” he tweeted to his 3.2 million followers, “we as a society have to stop taking these particular humans seriously.” “They want to destroy sports.”
This wasn’t presented as a disagreement about methods. Not “reporters should be nicer,” or “that question was unfair.” The message was stop taking them seriously. They want to destroy the thing you love.
Millions of people heard it, and it wasn’t framed as extreme. Rather, it was framed as common sense, like finally! someone is saying what we’re all thinking. The audience cheers because they’ve been conditioned to believe that asking questions is an act of hostility, and now here’s a huge media personality confirming it. The people who ask questions are the enemy, and soon they’ll be gone, and that will be good.
(That same day McAfee had Adam Schefter, ESPN’s NFL insider, on his show to report on what’s going on around the league.)
When someone with McAfee’s audience tells millions of viewers that reporters “want to destroy sports,” it’s not that he’s describing reality, but rather is building permission. He’s implicitly building permission for teams to revoke credentials; permission for fans to dismiss any accountability as an attack; permission for organizations that lock reporters out of a room to say they’re just protecting their people from the “haters.”
(Photo credit: Trevor Ruszkowski-USA TODAY Sports)
And yet the Kraken situation showed that people do have an instinct that questions matter. Fans recognized that something had been taken from them, even if they couldn’t always articulate exactly what: the instinct that reporters should be able to ask questions, that access matters, and that accountability isn’t optional.
The Jones-Turpin celebration showed how easily that instinct bends when the room feels warm instead of tense. The same people who would bristle at a team locking reporters out will applaud when a reporter voluntarily puts down the tool that makes her job meaningful, but the guiding principle is the same: the microphone is for questions. When one situation feels like evasion while the other feels like grace, that principle gets lost among the din of social media.
And hey, maybe it’s not that deep. This isn’t Israel and Hamas, after all. Nobody’s dying because a coach gave a non-answer about who is starting in goal on the first night of a back-to-back. Most pressers produce nothing, and most questions get non-answers. So why, then, do teams fight so hard to control them? The Kraken didn’t limit a press conference to 57 seconds because they think pressers are meaningless. Vegas didn’t revoke Lazerus’s credential because they believe questions are harmless. Teams fight for control over this stuff precisely because it matters to them. They do it because routine scrutiny constrains behavior, and they’d rather not be constrained.
“Most postgame press conferences produce no news” is only true if you define “news” as “scandal.” The case for daily access rests on everything else: injury updates, or lineup decisions, or why a player got benched, or why the penalty kill is struggling. We know these things only because someone asked, and someone answered. The Kraken put all their press conferences on social media and people watch them because they find value in them.
There’s also value in the routine itself. You ask the same question every week so that when the answer changes, you notice. The coach who always protects his players then suddenly doesn’t. A player’s tone when discussing the coaching staff gets a little cooler as the months go on. You start to see the deviations once you’ve established the pattern, and those deviations can yield meaningful insights.
The routine builds relationships that matter if something bigger does happen. Evan Drellich covered the Houston Astros for the Houston Chronicle from 2013 to 2016. When he and Ken Rosenthal broke the sign-stealing scandal in 2019, they did it because sources trusted him. Pitcher Mike Fiers went on the record with someone who’d been around and who had been doing the day-to-day work for years. Nothing came out of those Tuesday pressers to break the scandal, but they created the conditions that eventually led to the story being possible.
There’s also a part you can’t measure. How many times has a team chosen not to do something because they know they would get heat for it and they don’t want the press attention? You don’t see deterrence working, only what happens when it stops.
Millions of people watched the Jones-Turpin clip with the takeaway that asking questions is what the bad guys do. Maybe that fades and maybe it’s one moment with no real lasting cultural impact and everyone moves on. But if it doesn’t and “questions-are-hostility, cheerleading-is-journalism” is established as the new template, then here’s where it leads:
The next cover-up that stays covered won’t feel like a failure. Instead, it will feel like progress.