{"id":892722,"date":"2026-10-24T05:48:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T05:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/892722\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T05:48:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T05:48:20","slug":"nick-wright-calls-out-media-for-unfair-angel-reese-coverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/892722\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Wright calls out media for unfair Angel Reese coverage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grifters and pundits have a nasty habit of painting Angel Reese as the villain<\/a> in Caitlin Clark\u2019s origin story, but Reese has been the Atlanta Dream\u2019s hero in the WNBA Finals, and Nick Wright implored sports media to cover that\u00a0story.<\/p>\n

\u201cSports media needs to decide whether it wants to cover the WNBA or not,\u201d Wright said on FS1\u2019s\u00a0First Things First\u00a0on Thursday. \u201cHere\u2019s what I mean. This show, we are a vast majority an NFL and NBA show. Baseball playoffs, a little college football here and there. But what we don\u2019t do is be like, \u2018Oh! Did a Black player foul Caitlin Clark hard? Let\u2019s put that in the show! Enes Kanter making a fool of himself again<\/a>? Let\u2019s lead with it!’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome shows are doing that<\/a>, that\u2019s fine,\u201d Wright continued. \u201cIf you are one of those shows, then maybe pay attention to the actual basketball that\u2019s going on in the Finals right now because it\u2019s pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter Angel Reese.<\/p>\n

Wright had a few full-screen graphics ready showing Reese\u2019s dominant 2026 WNBA season to this point, including breaking<\/a> the all-time WNBA single-season rebounds record, winning her first Defensive Player of the Year award, and leading the Dream to a 2-1 series lead over the the Golden State Valkyries in the Finals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Should Reese become the Finals MVP en route to the Dream winning the franchise\u2019s first-ever championship, Wright ripped through how impressive her all-time basketball resume would look like.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn men\u2019s basketball, no matter what your regular-season standing is, if you\u2019re one of the best players but clearly not the best player, and then in the playoffs, you\u2019re clearly the best player and you lead your team to a championship, it raises your standing dramatically,\u201d Wright said. \u201cThere was a period of time where it felt to me like Angel\u2019s celebrity had outpaced her on-court production, where her basketball had stagnated a bit during her second year. That is flatly no longer the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wright stated that his aim wasn\u2019t to be \u201ca scold\u201d or dictate what sports shows must cover (even if this all occurred during his weekly \u201cSports Media Ombudsman\u201d segment). But he re-emphasized the hypocrisy plaguing WNBA media<\/a> specifically.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re gonna cover the sport for the gory, kind of culture war stuff<\/a>, then actually cover the sport when someone who\u2019s been a main character of your culture war stuff is playing great basketball,\u201d Wright said. \u201cI think Angel deserves a ton of credit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, Chris Broussard addressed the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like Caitlin Clark, but if she was doing what Angel\u2019s doing, it would be going crazy, and Angel is playing great,\u201d Broussard said.<\/p>\n

So-called fans and some corners of sports media may have tuned out after Clark and the Indiana Fever lost in the first round of the playoffs, but historic viewership numbers<\/a> prove there\u2019s plenty of interest in a Dream-Valkyries WNBA Finals, with Reese as the main character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grifters and pundits have a nasty habit of painting Angel Reese as the villain in Caitlin Clark\u2019s origin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[3691,3444,1760,182604,221847,99,434],"class_list":["post-892722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-angel-reese","tag-atlanta-dream","tag-caitlin-clark","tag-first-things-first","tag-nick-wright","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}