I was the program director of a journalism training center in Washington, D.C., a city with six professional teams and zero sports reporting gigs.

That latter part is only a slight exaggeration. 

The Right needs policy schools, and they need the Right 

An online meltdown over a return to biological reality in Kansas

You’d think the home of the Capitals, Nationals, Commanders, Wizards, Mystics, and D.C. United would have plentiful opportunities for aspiring sports journalists to learn the craft. But you’d be wrong. Demand for jobs in sports journalism far outstrips the supply.

Things have only gotten worse since my time as an instructor. Even the Washington Post cut its sports section, reflecting a trend that goes well beyond the D.C. region. 

As a niche discipline, sports reporting seems headed for extinction, which raises the obvious question: What happened? How did this beat go from being a staple of U.S. newsrooms to going the way of the dodo?

There are several reasons, but let’s focus on one of the most obvious: just as the roles of librarian and barista have become the exclusive domains of the chronically resentful, the septum-pierced, and the type of person to self-diagnose as having “long COVID,” so too has the field of sports journalism been taken over by incredibly annoying and deeply unlikable people — those who’ve adopted politics as a personality.

Take, for instance, the badgering from sports reporters that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman faced a few days ago over the U.S. men’s hockey team’s Feb. 22 Olympic victory in Milan — a historic win that sportswriters view as a bleak, joyless referendum on President Donald Trump. 

“I’m not going to weigh in on........

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