Last week, pretty much all anyone wanted to gossip about in the swimming world was what the heck was going on in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with Coley Stickels. I don’t begrudge anyone their desire to gossip, I like some messy drama just as much as the next person.
What is disturbing, however, is that Swimswam, nominally a “news” website, seems unwilling to seriously moderate comments in any way. I have pointed this out to them before, when they have posted stories of sexual abuse victims and allowed anonymous commenters the freedom to slag those victims.
In their defense, they have often cited “free speech”, which sounds great until you consider that constitutionally protected free speech has nothing to do with whether you’re allowed to insinuate that a sexual abuse victim is money grubbing whore without attaching your name to it.
With regards to the Stickels article, the 400+ comments include many accusations of behavior that transpired during his tenure as head coach of Alabama. I can’t vouch for the validity of any of these accusations, but I know the appropriate place for them to be adjudicated is not through anonymous comments on the internet.
The University of Alabama should do their due diligence (perhaps they already have), as should Safe Sport and USA Swimming (take that with the usual caveats of their near-inneffectiveness of doing anything of this nature). Perhaps one reason why we allow Swimswam’s commentary to thrive is how incompetent large organizations have proven themselves to be when investigating abuse by coaches. If so, a sad commentary on where we are.
Let me be clear, this is not a Coley Stickels defense post. It is a commentary on how the singular viable news source in the sport of swimming does its business.
I’ll say what I think the the truth is: my commentary with my name attached to it. I am willing to accept all the consequences. Swimswam loves inflammatory comment sections. They know that it drives massive traffic to their website. They will not shut it down because they (rightly) believe that it would kneecap their website.
I’d like to live in a world where most people only read the “hard” news and skipped the comment section but I guarantee most people spend far more time perusing the juicy, often incorrect gossip below the line. Our minds can’t unsee what we read in the comments, and therefore over time those comments get blended in with the “facts”.
Swimswam is giving the people (myself included) what they want. Perhaps they think that justifies it. Or perhaps they think that since it buoys the “real news” that they do it’s a necessary evil. All i know is what any parent knows: just because people want something doesn’t mean you should give it to them.