Longtime Seattle Times Sports Columnist Quits Over Paper Refused To Run His Sophie Cunningham Column

A longtime sports columnist at the Seattle Times, Matt Calkins, says he quit his job at the paper after it refused to publish a column he wrote about the controversy surrounding Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham’s stance on transgender athletes. Ms. Cunningham sparked a debate among WNBA fans about transgender athletes after she told ESPN that she does not believe women should have to compete against biological males.And the controversy reportedly led to Mr. Calkins quitting his job on the spot after his paper refused to publish a column on the subject. He wrote in a post on Substack on Thursday because the Seattle Times refused to publish a column he wrote, titled, “Agree with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”The sports columnist said he was inspired to write the column after he spoke to people who attended a rally in support of Ms. Cunningham who were cursed at by a Seattle Storm co-owner, Celeste Keaton. Mr. Calkins said that he sent a draft of the column to his editor on July 31 and told his editor that there was “no rush” to run it, but that his editor responded the same day and he hoped top editors would look at it. Nearly a week later, Mr. Calkins said that he was informed that the paper would not run his column because he did not tell his editor he was working on it in advance.“I didn’t buy this reasoning. If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days,” the columnist wrote. “My response? To resign on the spot.”Mr. Calkin said that the Seattle Times had spiked several of his columns before, including one questioning whether members of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were “really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit.”“The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob,” he said of his other columns that were not published.The Seattle Times declined to comment.

Longtime Seattle Times Sports Columnist Quits Over Paper Refused To Run His Sophie Cunningham Column

Longtime Seattle Times Sports Columnist Quits Over Paper Refused To Run His Sophie Cunningham Column

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