I think it happened right about 1993.
I grew up in NY, but my dad used to take me to a newsstand that had all of the papers and I used to by some national papers and then I would always get the DMN.
The local media always hammered Dallas pre-Jimmy. As Calvin Hill once famously said 'if you score two TD's in a quarter, Cowboys fans will complain you didn't score 3. If you score 3 TD's in a quarter, they will complain you didn't score 4. If you score 4 TD's in a quarter, they will complain that you didn't score them towards the fans side of the end zone.'
When I read that quote as a kid, I laughed because it was so true when reading the Dallas media. They would skewer Landry even after a big win and proclaim that he was too old and out-of-touch. After the big loss to the Bears in '85, the local press by and large wanted him fired and didn't want him to let the door hit him on the butt on the way out.
This was weird to me because I had grown up a Yankees fan, Knicks fan, Syracuse fan and Blackhawks fan (I lately moved allegiances to the NY Rangers). The NY press is different because there are a gazillion reporters. On a percentage rate scale, you will find the same percentage of negative writers. It's just that there are so many of them (you have to remember that many of the individual townships around NYC have their own paper with writers) that there's negative press if a coach or player allows some small-time beat writer to have a voice.
The Syracuse media liked to rip the school and JIm Boeheim when they could. I will say that the article that the school's own newspaper wrote ripping apart Gerry McNamara was something I had never quite seen on the college level. But, Syracuse really isn't a college town, so you get that kind of press. And the Blackhawks were largely ignored by the Chicago Tribune which was far more about the Bears, then the Bulls, and then the Cubs and Sox.
But still, when the team had success those newpapers and their beat writers were either happy for their success or they were like "hey, I may not like this coach (or player), but I can't argue against winning.'
Eventually, the Cowboys were so bad by the end of Landry's career that the local Dallas media was constantly criticizing him and demanding that he step down and if he wouldn't, that he should be fired. As much as I loved Tom Landry, he really was playing a childish game of avoiding Jerry face-to-face and as much as I love Tex Schramm, he should have fired Landry himself. But the media was calling for Landry's head and they were not being nice about how they would go about it and then when Jerry fires Landry and doesn't do it in person...they found their villain.
Problem was that the Cowboys were terrible and most of the rest of the country didn't care. The team and their presence had lost their luster with fans from the around the country. And furthermore, ESPN was still in its early years and didn't quite have the pull. But even more importantly, the ESPN you see now is nothing like the ESPN you saw then. Writer Tommy Craggs wrote an article about the old ESPN that we grew up watching. It was very serious about sports and sports journalism. It was about being accurate and portraying the story correctly. You have to remember that most people thought ESPN would never work in part because it was 'just about sports' and that the sentiment is that you can't take sports too seriously.
So ESPN did a great job of hiring reputable sports journalists that could make sports serious enough and guess what?
People took them seriously.
Eventually Jimmy and Jerry ran the show and again....nobody outside of Texas cared because the team was terrible. In Dallas the local media was now calling for Jimmy's head. And then they proved everybody wrong by winning the Super Bowl in 1992.
But, where we started to see things change was in 1993. Emmitt was holding out and Jimmy was having public meltdowns after going 0-2. I don't know if there was actual full blown hate for Dallas, but Jimmy and to a lesser extent Jerry, made for good drama and even I can't blame ESPN for following that story quickly. Still, the attitude was that the national press liked it because they wanted to knock the Cowboys down a peg. However, that didn't work as the Cowboys won that Super Bowl as well. And that's when you started to get the national press disliking the Cowboys because of their success, the troubles off the field and the 'bandwagon fans.' Growing up in Syracuse, I could tell you that I had never seen more bandwagon fans until the Bills became successful, but it was somehow the Cowboys who were already known as America's Team that had the 'bandwagon fans.' But, that's besides the point.
From there, we had the entire Jimmy vs. Jerry fiasco. Prior to that, the local media painted both Jerry and Jimmy as villains for getting Landry fired. But now the local media had figured out who to make the sole villain in Jerry Jones. Again, I can't blame the national press for following the Jimmy vs. Jerry saga since it was great drama and almost incredible that 2 men couldn't put their egos aside so they could accomplish something nobody has ever done before.
But where we started to see the national media take a real turn on us was when we signed Deion Sanders. ESPN in particular loved the Niners because their first big game coverage was 'The Catch.' They had a real affinity for Eddie Debartalo, Jerry Rice and Steve Young and here was ESPN starting to complain about it not being fair that the Cowboys could sign Sanders and Sanders was some sort of turncoat for doing so. The hypocrisy is that outside of Washington, no other team bought rosters like the Niners did in from '83 to '94 and they got away with highway robbery in getting Sanders in the first place. But when the tables were turned on the Niners, that was somehow 'unfair.'
The local media despised the Switzer hire (as did I), but Jerry could now say that he did win a Super Bowl without Jimmy just like he predicted and did it with Barry freaking Switzer of all people. The media has a disdain for admitting they were wrong, but they have a real problem with it in Dallas. Especially when Jerry wasn't afraid to say 'see, I told you so.'
Eventually, ESPN became more sensationalized. I really can't express the differences in ESPN today versus ESPN of yesteryear. I think a lot of it has to do with Berman and his popularity. Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann were tremendous together and what they did was make it serious and accurate, but with that fun spliced into it as Berman did. The only other anchors I can think of that had the intelligence and skill to do that was Charlie Steiner and Karl Ravech. Other than that, nobody else had that talent. Not Stuart Scott or Scott Van Pelt (who I generally like) or Trey Wingo (I like him, too).
Instead, ESPN became bigger and bigger and they became more about the fanboy point of view instead of actual journalism. In fact, for as much love as Grantland received, Bill Simmons may have acted like the biggest fanboy of them all.
And the issue with all of this is that ESPN found that hating the Cowboys = ratings. And we never had the local media to protect the Cowboys from nonsensical, unfounded and sensationalistic stories that often appeared to be made up just for ratings.
I'm always reminded of when Brett Favre signed with the Vikings and Adam Schefter claimed that a source told him there was a 'schism' in the Vikings locker room because half the locker room wanted Tavaris Jackson to start and not Brett Favre. I wish I was making that up.
It was the local Minnesota media that shut that nonsense down because it was so ridiculous that nobody believed it and they challenged Schefter's integrity on the subject. The story never had any legs to it and was forgotten about in a week other than Jared Allen making one of the funniest jokes ever about Schefter's claim.
In Dallas, the Cowboys don't get that. If that story was going on in Dallas, you could rest assured that the FWST would jump in with both feet on that story and constantly asking Brett Favre if he was in fear of losing his job to Tavaris freaking Jackson.
Out of all of the teams I have been a fan of, the Cowboys are the least fun to ever read about, regardless of when they have won Super Bowls or were doormats of the NFC East.
YR
