Jim Trotter says his Nick Bosa column was “watered down” by The Athletic

You can disagree with Jim Trotter regarding his views. There can be no disagreement that he has true courage.

After being fired by the NFL for daring to question the Commissioner — twice — during Super Bowl press conferences about newsroom diversity and inclusion in the NFL Media newsroom (the case was settled earlier this month), Trotter took a job with The Athletic. On Tuesday, he went public with his frustrations regarding the extent to which his column about Nick Bosa’s recent on-field MAGA hat was edited.

“Full disclosure, this is the watered-down version of the original column,” Trotter tweeted. “I was not allowed to properly, IMO, contextualize the significance and consequence of the moment because, I was told, I’d be in violation of the NYT’s journalistic standards regarding sports and political commentary. But that’s a discussion for another day.”

The New York Times issued a tomato/tomahto statement to AwfulAnnouncing.com, explaining that the Times had nothing to do with the editorial decisions made by the sports website it owns: “The New York Times standards played no role in this process. The story went through the normal editing process at The Athletic. We don’t publicly discuss our editorial decision making.”

Trotter, who clarified that the watering down was done by The Athletic and not the Times, did publicly discuss the editorial decision making. Folks at The Athletic might be agitated that he did.

If so, too bad. Let the man speak his mind. He’s a columnist. Let him write his column. So what if the column blurs the line between sports and political commentary? Bosa did it first; that’s why the issue is relevant.

When athletes choose to make sports political (and they have every right to do it), sports media has an obligation not to shy away from the issue but to analyze the activity and its ramifications.

Trotter’s point is that, if the NFL does nothing regarding Bosa’s blatant violation of the rules regarding the display of political messages, the NFL will have created a double standard as to Bosa and Colin Kaepernick, who was shunned for making a statement in a way that fully complied with the rules as written.

In Kaepernick’s case, evidence developed during his collusion grievance showed that the NFL chose to cater to the chunk of the fan base that hated Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem and ignored a similarly-sized percentage of the fan base that supported him. If the NFL stays silent as to Bosa, it will once again be kowtowing to a vocal minority that responds to legitimate dissent with hatred, insults, and threats.