The Boston Globe silent on Celtics star Kanter's trolling of LeBron James
The newspaper that usually slobbers over any national story with local or regional flavour is strangely ignoring this one with global importance
In August I wrote for American Greatness an analysis of the Boston Globe’s mind-twisting contortions of logic in covering the arrest of a cult of black separatists in Massachusetts. In it I documented how New England’s paper of record has become so politically and racially biased in its editorial line that it functions effectively as a local propaganda outlet for bigoted left-wing racial activists. This probably surprises no one as the Globe’s former sister publication The New York Times first published The 1619 Project, one of the most libelous and inflammatory pieces of historical “journalism” ever. Usually any story that has even a faint whiff of Boston, Massachusetts or New England connection seems to get the attention of the Globe or its other online site Boston.com, and ideally some flavour of racial indignation is injected into each story. That is why it is so inexplicable but not surprising that both the Globe and Boston.com have ignored the LeBron James-Enes Kanter war of words. Specifically, Kanter has tweeted and worn shoes that have demanded to know why LeBron James never speaks up for the rights of the Chinese people.
The logic that would explain the necessity of coverage of this is truly linear: 1. Kanter is the center for the Boston Celtics.-> 2. The Boston Globe and Boston.com cover New England sports teams such as the Red Sox, Bruins, Patriots, and yes also the Celtics. -> 3. LeBron James happens to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. -> 4. The greatest rivalry in NBA history is between the Celtics and Lakers, with twelve shared championship finals matching them up between 1959 and 2010.
In addition, the Celtics could really use some controversy as a pick-me-up. During the last season, an unsuccessful campaign that resulted in a first-round loss to Brooklyn, the Celtics’ ratings tanked while the Boston Bruins’ hockey TV ratings soared. Whereas the Lakers are eternally the most popular team in LA with the possible exception of the Dodgers, the Celtics have to constantly elbow for attention with three other successful clubs in hockey, baseball, and football even though they have no crosstown rivals like the Lakers do. The counterpoint to that is this: Kanter’s challenging of LeBron James for refusing to stand up to China is merely a distraction. It has no relevance to basketball. But on the pages of the Globe the themes of race, gender, and sexual orientation are often injected uninvited into topics where they are a distraction:
In October with the city’s mayoral election capturing daily headlines, the paper published an article claiming Muslim and African immigrants felt snubbed by eventual victor Michelle Wu leaving a community debate early and joining by Zoom.
The paper endlessly groveled before Acting Mayor Kim Janey, the first woman mayor and first black mayor who succeeded Martin Walsh in 2021 when he left to become US Secretary of Labour. Janey was endlessly lionized by the Globe even though Boston’s quality of life continued to deteriorate under her as homeless encampments took over the Massachussets Ave. and Cass Boulevard area.
When Janey finished in fourth in the September Primary, the Globe attributed the loss in part to higher turnout in whiter neighbourhoods, subtly hinting at white racism against the first black mayor as opposed to the other possible cause: black apathy towards uninspiring candidates.
The paper’s metro section ran this weekend a feature story about a vigil for the Transgender Day of Remembrance at the tiny Simmons University in the Fenway neighbourhood. How big of a deal was this? The vigil was not even covered by Simmons U’s Facebook page.
Newsworthiness vs. editorial comfort
All of this is not to diminish the fact that a city’s newspaper and web-paper of record shouldn’t focus exclusively on sports stories or other fluff pieces. However, one must recognize that when the Globe/Boston.com chooses to it foams at the mouth in outrage over off-the-field stories of dubious newsworthiness for athletic teams at the high school level. Recently it has provided day-to-day updates about racist activities by players for the Danvers High School hockey team in the northeast county of Essex including hazing and swastikas in the bathrooms. In June it had a similarly obsessive approach to anti-Jewish play audibles by Duxbury High School’s football team in Plymouth County. So what may lay behind this editorial decision?
Tempting the Dragon
Since 2019 the NBA has been embroiled in an image crisis relating to its decision to overlook human rights abuses in China. The league has coveted the massive emerging market of the East Asian superpower where many former NBA players like Stephon Marbury and Gilbert Arenas go to play when their domestic careers are over. However as the US-China geopolitical rivalry has become more bitter under former President Donald Trump the league has done its best to steer clear from upsetting Beijing, even ignoring worrying political and ethnic repression in the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
The latest episode in this at times comedic but ultimately tragic saga has transpired over this weekend in Boston, yet the city’s paper of record is remaining curiously silent on it. For those needing context, here is a quick rehashing of some of the central events that led to this:
2017: Then Cleveland Cavaliers power forward LeBron James made increasingly vocal political pronouncements in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, including calling him a “bum” when the president rescinded an invitation to host the rival Golden State Warriors after their star point guard Stephen Curry vowed not to visit the White House following their NBA Finals victory.
2019: James, now with the Lakers, commented that China critic and Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey “wasn’t educated on the situation at hand” when he tweeted #FreeHongKong in 2019.
2020: James tweeted #FreeWOJ in support of ESPN writer Adrian Wojnarowski who was suspended for sending a vulgar letter to GOP Senator Josh Hawley after he sent a critical letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver over the league’s reticence towards criticizing China. He was appropriately castigated for reversing his supposed standard of people having to be “educated” since the issue that had led to this was the NBA-China relationship and not Wojnarowski’s letter in response.
Of course after the 2020 election and Trump’s exit from office LeBron James has still not responded to the critical issue of how the NBA is openly supporting political and racial messaging at home in the United States while remaining entirely mute on issues of political repression in the world’s most populous nation. LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke, an ESPN on-air contributor, took a shot at James during the original controversy, writing that “for LeBron James, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … except in China”. This was playing off of James’ tweeting of a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2018 in response to those telling him to quit commenting incessantly on political issues.
So on Friday the LeBron-China (or LeChina as his haters call him) scab was picked at again, this time by Enes Kanter who’s been no stranger to political controversy. Kanter’s family’s long-standing imprisonment by their native Turkey’s authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his own nullified citizenship, and this season he has broadened his vocal criticism to include the Chinese government.
On the face of it Kanter and James have had dramatically different paths in life, particularly as basketball players. LeBron James is the most high profile NBA player of the early 20th century with the possible exclusion of the late Kobe Bryant. His childhood was spent in the depressed mid-size city of Akron raised by his mother Gloria without a father figure. James is a generational talent and is often compared in cliched debates to all-time great Michael Jordan. As an Ohioan I can remember LeBron as a high school junior being heralded as the next basketball god, and being crowned as “King James” immediately upon being drafted at age 18 by the Cleveland Cavaliers. After several early career disappointments, James has won four championships with three franchises, a rare accomplishment.
Meanwhile Kanter is a journeyman having come up in American prep schools and the youth division of Turkey’s elite Fenerbahce sports club. His father is a university professor and his mother a nurse, and he enjoyed a relatively stable family life as a child. As a professional player, Kanter has had solid seasons including four where he averaged double digit rebounds and nine with double digit point averages. But most NBA fans wouldn’t put him even among the top twenty players in the league any season that he has played. For what it’s worth, after Kanter condemned James’ silence concerning Chinese abuses the Lakers’ star claimed that his critic was merely trying to gain attention at his expense. Oh yeah, and the Celtics ended up blowing out LA on Friday night, 130-108.
Playmakers or policy makers?
Whatever the outcome, Kanter’s statements are newsworthy in Boston, if not nationwide. The Globe decided that it was “standing with” hate crime hoaxer Bubba Wallace in 2020. The Globe took Olympic hammer thrower Gwen Berry seriously as an activist when she claimed she was “set up” at the podium during an Olympic qualifying event when the US national athlete was played, saying “America does not see the humanity of Black girls and women”. And most of all it has toed the party line in elevating the washed up Colin Kaepernick who only became an activist when benched in favour of Blaine Gabbert (!) in 2016. Recently they published an op-ed that asked why vaccine mandate opponent Aaron Rodgers’ clash with the league would fade from the headlines while former San Francisco QB Colin Kaepernick would likely never play in the NFL again due to his national anthem protest. The piece went through a laundry list of NFL back-ups that it gripes are not worthy while Kaepernick sits it out without a team. Apparently the Globe’s Gary Washburn doesn’t understand that Aaron Rodgers remains valuable in Green Bay because he is strictly a cold-hearted football competitor and not a self-righteous fanatic like Kaepernick who clearly doesn’t seem to care about the game and sees its talent evaluation process as akin to the slave trade.
All of these politicized sports stories warranted columns in the Boston Globe, whereas Kanter’s did not even merit one on a weekend when the Patriots had already played, the Red Sox are in their off-season, and the Bruins were finishing up a road trip. Perhaps the paper did not want to disagree with Kanter and risk being perceived to be siding with a hated LA Laker in James. Whatever the reason, there is no explanation that I can see as to how the Globe could have unintentionally not covered it.