Last week, the Sixers put out a curious statement via the 76Place Twitter account, which is the working name for the arena they’d like to build on Market Street in downtown Philadelphia. The project is still in the “entitlements and approvals” phase, a crucial part of the timeline in getting this thing off the ground, and a glut of recent reporting has centered heavily on pushback from the neighboring Chinatown community.
That resulted in the team coming out to denounce what they call “misinformation campaigns,” writing “it is disappointing to see some groups claiming to represent the broader interests of the city irresponsibly spreading misinformation about our proposed plans.” The longer statement was truncated in a Twitter-friendly graphic format:
The Sixers don’t mention any specific “groups” in the statement. They don’t name any media outlets, organizations, or individuals, instead generically asking for “respectful” discussion that’s “grounded in facts.”
Every major outlet has reported on the Sixers arena, but based on the timing of this statement, simple context clues, and the Zeitgeist of the particular moment, it’s pretty obvious that the alleged “misinformation” can be traced to the messaging from various Chinatown opposition groups and the paired media coverage. It’s not hard to connect the dots here.
The most important outlet highlighting these voices, by far, is The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has produced more arena content than any other publication in the region. So to continue a project I started a few weeks ago, an exercise in media analysis, I went back through seven months of Inquirer reporting on the Sixers arena, beginning with the July 21st announcement. I logged each story touching on the proposal, and came up with these findings:
In determining what was “favorable” or “unfavorable” towards the arena, I used my own discretion and bounced ideas off other Philadelphia media members. Ultimately, there’s an arbitrary nature to the parsing of the data, but I did my best in an effort to be fair.
For reference now, here’s the full list, with author, title, hyperlink, and category, in reverse chronological order:
There’s a lot to unpack here, but there are are some obvious patterns. The first wave of arena stories covered every angle imaginable, and all of them were more or less right down the middle. There was a lot of high-quality straight news, with a few neutral columns and some well-written history and opinion pieces. Sixers beat writers Keith Pompey and Gina Mizell authored stories along with sports columnist Mike Sielski, while the non-sports desks got involved in a thorough exercise that saw the Inquirer pretty much hammer the story from every side, right out of the gate. From July 21st to November 17th, there was some brilliant content published in the paper and online at Inquirer.com.
I noticed a shift in coverage when I got to December, when there wasn’t much left to report from a straight news perspective. Everything had already been covered in the summer, such as the arena’s impact on Market East, the background of the Fashion District, and what this would mean for transit. By the winter, public Chinatown community meetings were taking place, and the Inquirer leaned hard into this, deploying the recently-created “Communities and Engagement” desk. From December 1st to February 15th, there were more than a dozen published pieces that highlighted Chinatown opposition voices, not including hard news reporting on the Filbert St. parking garage bill involving Councilman Mark Squilla and Mayor Kenney’s staff, resulting in Chinatown leaders criticizing what they thought was “a secretive back-door deal to facilitate the groundwork for the proposed arena.” Pertaining to the Asian Americans United meeting specifically, when Sixers’ Chief Diversity and Impact Officer David Gould was shouted down by irate residents, the Inquirer published multiple written stories, a video piece, and even a photo gallery of the meeting. They covered that specific gathering from all angles, while each of the local TV stations sent reporters and cameras as well. That event was widely covered by media outlets across the city.
Included in this December to-mid-February time frame were four published letters to the editor, three of which were anti-arena, and a fourth that suggested moving 76 Place to 8th and Market instead. Only when Daniel Pearson on the opinion desk wrote “A downtown arena for the Sixers can be a Philly thing, too” did the Chinatown pattern end, in late February, before starting up again in early March with a story about protests outside developer David Adelman’s University City office. Regarding quotes in these stories, there doesn’t seem to be as much from Sixers representatives as there was earlier in the timeline.
I spoke with about a dozen people at the Inquirer (either on background or off the record, none wanted to go on the record for obvious reasons), representing various desks. Some downplayed the heavy lean into Chinatown stories, noting that this simply floated to the top because community was the main topic of the moment. An influx of those stories was to be expected, especially with the Communities and Engagement desk created for scenarios like this one. Others, however, were aware of the idea that the hard focus on Chinatown gave off the impression that the paper was taking sides by elevating opposition voices while the Sixers were found defending themselves on multiple fronts.
Regardless, Chinatown has been the major recurring topic in the Inquirer’s coverage. 23 of 57 stories pertaining to 76 Place have a primary focus on the neighborhood, which amounts to 40.3% of the coverage, and that’s not just a product of the winter shift. There were nine stories published before December that focused on Chinatown. Meantime, only five stories in total have focused directly on Market East, where the arena is positioned (front facing towards Market, butting up against Chinatown along Filbert Street), likely because Chinatown is a minority residential area and Market East is largely an underperforming retail corridor with no real “community” to speak of.
Notably, through the Communities and Engagement desk, the Inquirer has elevated opposition Chinatown voices, while arena-favorable voices in the community are largely nonexistent. It could certainly be the case that Chinatown is overwhelmingly in opposition of the arena being built, but reading the Inquirer it feels like the skew is 100%, to 0%, with not one resident there in favor.
A quirky thing that popped up in this study was the aggregation of a Wall Street Journal story about Adelman’s expensive wine collection, which was posted on December 19th, just a few days after the much-publicized Chinatown AAU meeting, when the Sixers got absolutely clobbered in the press. The purpose of the story? I’m not sure, unless it was to paint the arena developer as an out-of-touch rich white man on the heels of negative publicity for the organization. However, people I spoke with at the Inquirer overwhelmingly believed this was goofy timing via digital desk aggregation, and not some nefarious pile on. I was asked by Inquirer employees to note that the various desks (sports, news, opinion) typically work on their own and operate in a silo-like fashion, with less macro-level oversight, which would explain why content looks topically “clumpy,” for lack of a better word.
Another thing you’ll notice is that op-eds published by the Inquirer skew negatively towards the arena. It’s not egregious, but I counted six total, then added the Daniel Pearson column to the group (he’s on the opinion desk), and found that the only favorable piece was co-authored by a Sixers employee (Gould) and the CEO of Mosaic Development Partners. There is a neutral-to-favorable op-ed from a freelancer, and the neutral one from Pearson, while three negative op-eds were written by former mayoral candidate Sam Katz, three former D.C. Chinatown residents, and the man running a Chinatown basketball organization. The other neutral op-ed was authored by Drexel’s Harris Steinberg, who runs the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation.
What’s curious about the opinion content is that prominent local figures (of color, no less) have written neutral or favorable op-eds on the arena that did not appear on Inquirer pages. Former mayor Michael Nutter confirmed to Crossing Broad that he submitted a piece to the Inquirer, which was ultimately turned down. The article, neutral in tone and calling for due diligence, ended up being published at the WHYY website instead. Additionally, labor leader Ryan Boyer (who was quoted in early Inquirer arena stories) wrote a message of outright support that went up at The Philadelphia Tribune on Friday, March 3rd.
“We submitted an op-ed on the 76 Place project to the Inquirer but have not yet received a response,” said a spokesperson for Boyer.
This is an interesting nugget, when you consider the fact that these are the type of guest editorials that the Inquirer has historically welcomed. You want the city’s biggest voices, in this case two black men, using your outlet for dissemination, not going to publications with a smaller reach. It would be like Jeffrey Lurie approaching Crossing Broad with an op-ed and us telling him “nah we’re good.” It just doesn’t happen, and in this case, if those submissions were accepted and published, the op-ed balance would be more or less right down the middle in terms of representing both sides of the discussion.
This all brings us back to the nascent, six-person Communities and Engagement Desk, created just last year, which became heavily involved with the Sixers arena in early December. Reporter Massarah Mikati, who leads the Inquirer with seven Chinatown/arena bylines, is a member of this desk, which is tasked with “representation and community visibility in The Inquirer’s reporting,” with a focus “on building non-transactional relationships with communities, with an eye to better serving them.” This was something Inquirer employees pointed to as source of contention, with the desk’s activities slanting arena coverage negatively. Several Inquirer sources spoke of “hostile” meetings involving the Communities and Engagement desk, painting the picture of a standoffish entity that seemed uninterested in macro-level concerns of how their pursuits might compromise their colleagues’ efforts. Other employees said they disapproved of a Mikati story titled A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR FIGHTING BIG DEVELOPMENT, which reads like a handbook for grassroots activism. For what it’s worth, however, every single Inquirer employee I spoke with thought the Communities and Engagement desk was a good idea, and a necessary one, explaining that the operation of the desk was the problem, and not its larger mission.
The conclusion I came to, independent of Inquirer sources, is that the high concentration of Chinatown stories gives off the perception that the Inquirer is anti-arena, even if that’s not necessarily the case. There’s an obvious reason for this notion. When you go back to the employee revolt of 2020, which saw editor Stan Wischnowski resign, the result was the commissioning of the Temple study, which confirmed what we already knew – that the Inquirer was relatively old, white, and not adequately representing communities of color. We wrote about this in a 2021 deep dive, titled “Amid Wholesale Changes, Philadelphia Inquirer Employees Tell Crossing Broad About the Sports Department’s Current Mix of Anxiety, Curiosity, and Dubious Morale.”
So it made sense, that in the wake of the Black Lives Matter reckoning, the Inquirer would create a desk that exists to better serve under-represented communities. What I think happened, however, is that they over-corrected, because in elevating previously-marginalized voices, it makes it seem like the Inquirer is taking their side, simply by the amount of dedicated publishing volume and linear tone. It’s like the pendulum swung too far to the other side. The Communities and Engagement desk should exist, in this case, to give opposition Chinatown voices the same power and reach as those of the Sixers and David Adelman, and not necessarily as a media extension of neighborhood and activist groups. Folks like Larry Platt at The Philadelphia Citizen have observed this.
Perhaps that’s where the distinction needs to be drawn, because the Inquirer’s straight-news reporting on the arena has been very good. It’s been thorough and fair. Those early pieces from Inga Saffron and Thomas Fitzgerald were high quality, and Sielski’s sports-focused columns were balanced. Joseph DiStefano has six bylines full of solid work. Sean Collins Walsh has done a nice job as well, along with myriad other early contributors. It’s the recent turn, spearheaded by the Communities and Engagement desk, combined with the op-ed decision making, which gives off the impression that the Inquirer wouldn’t mind seeing the arena fail.
If that were to be the case, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but then the Inquirer should declare that stance and toss it over to Jenice Armstrong or Will Bunch on the opinion desk for explanation, in the same way the paper might endorse a mayoral or presidential candidate. My takeaway is that the notable shift in coverage has muddled the Inquirer’s output to the point where it’s diminishing the quality work published in the fall and summer, while blurring the already-thin line between journalism and activism.
Crossing Broad reached out to the Inquirer earlier in the week for comment, and will update this story if they’d like to respond.
We did get in touch with the Sixers, who said they stood by the statement issued last week, while noting that they’ve requested a meeting with Inquirer leadership.