The raging political biases and lack of self-control by leaders and personalities at ESPN continue to drag politics into the network’s content, no matter how little people want to be lectured to by a “sports” network.
The Wall Street Journal detailed several aspects of ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro’s tenure, mostly focused on his wheeling and dealing on streaming and broadcast deals to keep ESPN afloat. The piece ends with a summary of the politics that have been pushed into ESPN content, something to which Pitaro paid lip service when he entered the role.
The piece details that the murder of George Floyd in 2020 changed Pitaro’s perspective. According to Stephen A. Smith, one of the obnoxious on-air “talents” who has brought politics to the network’s airwaves for years, “It was unavoidable that we were going to find ourselves veering beyond the world of sports.” Elle Duncan, another toxic political voice, said Pitaro supports her talking about abortion or sex changes for children on air because “they’re not political issues.”
Duncan is a run-of-the-mill progressive who thinks all her positions on politics aren’t political because they are all “human rights” issues, to the point that she uses halftime of basketball games to lecture viewers, apparently with the support of Pitaro. But Smith’s comments are far more interesting: “It was unavoidable that we were going to find ourselves veering beyond the world of sports.”
The unavoidable question to this is simple: Why?
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Why was it “unavoidable” for ESPN to “veer beyond the world of sports.” It is, presumably, a sports network. What part of Floyd’s death has anything to do with sports? If you want to cover current events, you could be CNN. If you want to cover what athletes say about current events, that makes you a tabloid. Talking about Floyd, Texas abortion laws, or Florida preventing pornography from being in first-grade classrooms is not what a sports network does, and it certainly is not some inevitable transformation.
ESPN should be far more concerned about the declining quality of its actual content, made most apparent by a blowhard in Smith being one of the most prominent faces on the network, than about trying to become like every other liberal political media outlet in the country. No viewers asked Smith or Duncan to lecture about politics, and certainly no one asked Pitaro to allow them to do so when viewers just want to watch sports.