So it turns out that Mike Holmgren was serious about this “you’re either with us or you’re not” thing. Per Scene’s Vince Grzegorek: “Multiple sources tell Scene Tony Grossi is no longer the Browns beat writer for the Plain Dealer as of today.”
Last week, Grossi accidentally tweeted the following about Randy Lerner: “He is a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.” He has lost his post as a result of that.
He was in hot water with his editors and bosses at the PD over the inadvertent tweet, which displayed a huge bias, hatred even, toward the Browns’ owner.
There was an obvious question whether he could objectively continue to cover the beat, one which the Plain Dealer weighed in on today with the move.
Maybe someone at the PD might have gotten to this three years ago when Grossi introduced himself to Eric Mangini by foaming and cursing at him, or any time before that or after, as he worked an astonishing hatchet job on the last Browns coach. But as hard as it is not to connect the pathetic state of the Browns franchise over the last decade with the pathetic work of the top man whose job it is to shine a light on it, and for all the times that Grossi let “bias” and “hatred” infect his reporting, it’s depressing and telling that he wasn’t removed from his post until that bias and hatred found a most worthy target in Lerner.
Literally.
In a vacuum, Grossi’s long overdue removal would be an unqualified good, and we still have to think it’s for the best, but we also have to acknowledge the possibility that what ends up in Grossi’s place will be worse, especially if the PD’s hand was forced by the Browns organization. A festering bunker mentality in Berea is no less a concern with Grossi off of the beat, and we can only hope that whoever or whatever takes his place sees that it was Tony’s systemic dishonesty and unprofessionalism that really did him in in the end (we have to hope that’s what really did him in in the end and that the Lerner tweet was just the straw that broke the camel’s back). Maybe a more credible reporter keeps his job after a slip like this — a reporter who’d done the work to back up the ‘insult’ with the factual narrative that’s there to support it — but certainly not Grossi, or any reporter whose M.O. was to alternate between covering up for such an important subject and blurting insults at him to suit the reporter’s own convenience.
As much as there’s always something sad about somebody losing his job, the PD is a union shop, so it’ll probably be extremely hard for them to fire Grossi with him having been on the job for so long. Maybe they’ll read him his Branson Rights and send him to Cleveland.com’s Yarborough Country with the former Cavs beat writer. A new fishing and hunting buddy for D’Arcy Egan? There’s also a chance they could make him a columnist like Terry Pluto, Bill Livingston or Bud Shaw, in which case Grossi wouldn’t really lose his voice at all.
But wherever he ends up from here, it looks like he won’t be in the Browns facilities with any regularity in the near future after having dominated the beat for over 25 years, including the entirety of the historically embarrassing Lerner Era. That he hasn’t issued a tweet since his fateful slip of last Thursday helps to confirm Grzegorek’s report.
If you’re one who’s loathe to underestimate the impact of the interaction between the humans who play for and run the football team and the reporters who are in and out of team facilities every day, or if the concept of entropy otherwise means anything to you, you might well take this as good news. If you’re familiar at all with Grossi’s work and that of the Lerner Era Cleveland Browns, it’s impossible not to take this as good news; Not as a funeral bell for Grossi’s career (we hope and assume he’ll land on his feet somewhere, “what doesn’t kill you,” etc.) but as a long-deserved demotion from an important representative position in which he’s long shown he’s unfit to serve. Anyway, there are countless worse ways to go out than by taking a shot at an irresponsible billionaire. Nobody shouldn’t appreciate that.
