Saturday’s news that 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan had been in a serious car accident was surprising, to say the least. Although he’s dealing with more than a few significant physical issues, including a severe concussion, the injuries were not life-threatening, and it appears that he’s on a path to recovery.
There’s a separate issue that’s hard to ignore regarding the accident itself. It happened on July 14. The 49ers managed to keep it from being reported for 11 days.
It possibly would still be a secret today; the disclosure coincided with the first day of the team’s 2026 training camp. And, in hindsight, the effort to get the word out seems to have been engineered.
The 49ers posted their statement regarding the accident at 12:00 p.m. ET on Saturday. Adam Schefter of ESPN posted his first tweet on the situation exactly one minute later, at 12:01 p.m. ET. The ESPN article about the accident was published at 12:02 p.m. ET. Nick Wagoner, who covers the 49ers for ESPN and who shared credit with Schefter for the story, reposted Schefter’s tweet at 12:03 p.m. ET.
Why would ESPN hold the information until the 49ers disclosed it? Beyond the obvious fact that the NFL now owns 10 percent of ESPN (which means the 49ers own 1/32nd of the 10 percent), this kind of negotiated reporting isn’t uncommon. Given that ESPN had information that wasn’t in the 49ers’ release (e.g., injury details and news from local law enforcement about the other driver not being injured, the finding that alcohol or drugs were not a factor, and the decision that no one should be cited for the crash), it’s fair to wonder if ESPN made a deal with the 49ers to hold the news until the team announced it — possibly in exchange for receiving the full specifics about Shanahan’s injuries.
Others who cover the 49ers knew about it, too. Before the news was released, Tim Kawakami of the San Francisco Standard dropped a hint: “I think there’s going to be some news later this morning.” Kawakami later admitted that he was aware of the situation, but that he didn’t report it because he “knew about 15% of the details.”
Still, he apparently knew 100 percent of the fact that there was an accident. Not every detail related to the story needed to be reported, especially when plenty of the basic information about the collision was available from public sources.
News regarding events that entail the involvement of the police and/or other first responders rarely gets held. It’s public information. (For example, news regarding Tony Romo’s recent arrest was shared as soon as Fox News 6 in Wisconsin obtained the public arrest detention report.) In this situation, the conduits for publicly-available information to the general public either were asleep at the switch or made a deliberate choice not to perform one of the core functions of journalism.
Brokering a deal (either in exchange for more facts or because the team asks nicely) to hold publicly-available information until the team decides to disclose it isn’t journalism. It’s the antithesis of journalism.
But it’s hardly uncommon in sports. Whether it’s an exercise in trading favors or ensuring that the organization being covered doesn’t freeze out a reporter who failed to go along with the plan, it happens all the time. This is just the latest example of it.
As Jay Glazer of Fox told me years ago, true journalism in sports involves finding out the stuff they don’t want us to know, not reporting something that’s going to be announced in five minutes. Implicit in finding it out is, after doing so, finding a way to report it.
Shanahan’s accident happened on a public highway. Public agencies responded to it. Basic information about the situation was publicly available. And folks who publicize relevant information to the public for a living chose not to do it until they got the go-ahead from the 49ers.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Reporters owe a primary duty to their audience, not to the entities they cover.
In sports, that line started to blur when leagues and teams began hiring reporters to cover them. Twenty years later, that line is long gone.
