The Knicks play at Madison Square Garden. The World Cup is taking place at the Meadowlands. The Delaney Hall concentration camp is in the industrial sector of Newark. All three places are within half an hour of each other. I asked ChatGPT to run a quantitative analysis of the amount of mass media coverage each event was getting in mainstream reporting in the New York metro area. This is what it said:

My estimate for New York metropolitan media exposure over the last month:

• World Cup: roughly 5–10× the coverage of Delaney Hall.
• Knicks during the Finals: perhaps 10–50× Delaney Hall.
• Delaney Hall: among the biggest New Jersey political stories of 2026, but not a dominant metropolitan story.

The same thing holds for, say, The New York Times: constant, day-by-day, even play-by-play coverage of the Knicks playoffs and the World Cup, but only a fraction of that for Delaney Hall.

Imagine that mainstream outlets covered sports events the way they cover political events. Instead of daily coverage of every game, you would sporadically see a random article describing some random swatch of some random game, except that you’d never learn the score of the game itself. It would just be taken for granted that reporters habitually checked out of games before they ended, treating the score as superfluous.

A week later, you’d see another article of a similar sort. The expectation would be that you could somehow form an impression of the whole championship without ever knowing the score of any particular game. A basket or a goal might be mentioned, with no indication of how it was brought about. Random highlights of the game would be repeated ad nauseum with no sense of how they related to the game as such. Commentary would be provided by people with a stake in the outcome but who had never been to the game.

This seems absurd, but it’s literally how Delaney Hall has been covered in the mass media.

I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but here’s another set of obvious truths. If celebrations of the sort we’ve seen in New York City over the Knicks were to take place on Doremus Avenue in front of Delaney Hall, the protesters would either be massacred or they’d force the facility to shut down. Either way, their presence would be a game changer.

But they’re not there. It’s worth asking what it says about our society that we can so blithely ignore the existence of a concentration camp while making such a big deal about sports events happening at almost the same locale. Now that the Knicks playoffs are over, and the World Cup is being revealed to be the embarrassment and fiasco it is, maybe some of those sports fans could consider showing up at Delaney Hall. With numbers like that, we can make a difference. It would be a game changer. If only it was just a game.