The firestorm ignited by the UFC’s (now temporary) banning of five-time Mixed Martial Arts journalist of the year Ariel Helwani from their events, as you have no doubt heard by now, led to a public relations disaster the likes of which the UFC have never seen and nor did they expect.
The treatment of the MMAFighting.com reporter, where he was summoned backstage by UFC President Dana White and summarily dismissed from The Forum in Inglewood, California, for breaking news of the return of former UFC heavyweight champion and current WWE superstar Brock Lesnar at next month’s UFC 200 event in Las Vegas, disturbed all elements of the media and made headlines in publications as varied as The Guardian and The Washington Post.
So intense was the reaction by the media to the blacklisting of Helwani and his colleagues Esther Lin and Casey Leydon that you would have been forgiven for thinking that this was a one-off mistake by Zuffa, an overreaction which was quickly rectified as soon as calmer heads prevailed. But Helwani and co. aren’t the first MMA media members to have been castigated by White. The practice has been going on for more than a decade.
Josh Gross is one the prevailing voices in the MMA media. He has been covering the sport for the likes of Sherdog, Sports Illustrated and, more lately, ESPN and earned a reputation as one of the pioneers of this new age of combat journalism. Despite working at the forefront of the sport for such a long time, don’t expect to see Gross front and centre at press row during a UFC event.
Speaking to The Fight Network yesterday evening, he said:
When it happened to me, quite frankly it happened to the entire MMA media industry. We are all thrown out in 2005. Most of the people have been reinstated in terms of credentials. Basically, they offered me a job [as editor of UFC.com] and I didn’t take it and was told that I would regret it.
Gross provoked Dana White’s anger even further by publishing a story revealing the finalists of the fourth season of the UFC’s reality show ‘The Ultimate Fighter’.
They’re not above being vindictive or petty. They’ve done great things with mixed martial arts and the UFC. They have grown the UFC business into a multi-billion dollar brand and in a lot of ways it’s difficult to question the steps that they’ve taken but think their steps with media along the way have been unfortunate – and I’m speaking from personal experience.
Other media members, notably Loretta Hunt and Jeff Sherwood, have also had their press credentials revoked at one point or another for UFC-perceived infractions.
To bring the debate stateside for a moment, this isn’t a first amendment issue because the UFC is a private company and they are completely within their rights to issue press credentials as they see fit but, when you look at the issue objectively, it makes little sense to try and mute that voice of a reporter through whom so many MMA fans consume their news, get hyped for events and, in theory, spend money on Zuffa products after hearing his reports.
It seem that Zuffa and the UFC aren’t interested in the traditional method of sports reporting, preferring instead for media to act more as a PR wing to report on their methodically constructed narrative.
Gross echoed this idea on The Fight Network:
They seek to control everything, that’s nothing new. The UFC tries to control the media narratives around their business in a hundred different ways, including banning reporters that don’t fit that narrative. Those are not steps that I think most businesses would take.
Though Helwani has since been reinstated, even after Dana White yesterday said that this would never happen as long as he was in charge, you can bet that their decision was influenced to a great degree by the continuous waves of negative publicity their decision had sent their way and, in the end, was little more than a business decision rather than an admission that they had acted too hastily.
Lorenzo Fertitta, the casino magnate who co-owns the UFC and the person who is said to have ordered the reporter’s removal, may well have learned that strong-arm tactics which produce results in the gambling business aren’t as effective when their target has as significant a mouthpiece as Helwani, particularly when he can reach so many sympathetic ears.
This [turned] into a firestorm that perhaps they didn’t realise. They’ve done this thing to other reporters and it wasn’t a big deal but this is a different time and a different media age.
