Matt Calkins, sports columnist for the Seattle Times, resigned from the outlet after 11 years, claiming that editors spiked his op-ed defending Sophie Cunningham.
“After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign,” he wrote in a post on X. “It was entirely my choice, and it was not an easy one. The impetus was the Times declining to run a column I wrote from the perspective of two female student athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males.”
“It was one of several pieces of mine that had been spiked, and I no longer felt like I could properly do my job,” he added. “I want to say that I enjoyed my time with the paper, find the talent there to be immense, and have no animosity toward anyone who works there. It was just time for a change.”
Calkins detailed the events that led to his decision in a Substack post, claiming that he wrote: “supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic.” According to Calkins, a draft of the piece was subjected to multiple reviews before it was finally spiked.
“I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it,” Calkins wrote. “He told me later that day that he and others were looking at it, but that it wouldn’t be ready for Sunday’s paper.”
“Monday night, I got an email saying that his boss was hoping to talk to the top two newsroom editors about it on Wednesday. No feedback had been given to me,” he added. “Thursday afternoon, my editor informed me that it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this 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.”
Calkins said he decided to “resign on the spot” due to the spike, adding that he noticed a pattern at the outlet regarding the types of pieces they would spike.
“One was a piece questioning whether players for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit,” he wrote. “Another was a more general column on cancel culture in sports. The last, written shortly after George Floyd’s death, implored people to listen to state-champion basketball coach Mike Bethea — a black man urging the public not to stereotype cops. The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.”
Surprisingly, Calkins had support from none other than former ESPN reporter Jemele Hill.
“It’s not the first column of his to be spiked, and while I strongly disagree with all of the columns the Times didn’t run, they should have published them,” she said.
“Unless these columns were factually inaccurate or not meeting journalistic standards, run it and deal with the fallout. If people get pissed, so be it. Let him have to defend his shitty opinions in the public square. I totally get why he resigned,” she added.