It’s been a tough time for ESPN. The network is losing money and viewers, and just laid off more than a hundred employees, including some of its best-known faces. It’s committed unforced errors: To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Worldwide Leader in Sports published a poem in praise of a woman convicted of killing a police officer, a murderer who has been in Cuba for the last four decades hiding from the American justice system. The poem was eventually withdrawn from ESPNw, a website designed to appeal to a female audience, but the larger question remains: What’s going on in Bristol?
Some commentators contend that ESPN’s social justice messaging is pushing away viewers who look to sports as a respite from our toxic politics, who just want to pop open a beer at the end of the day and relax. Defenders argue that the network is performing a valuable public service, addressing issues of race that vex our games no less than society. Fair enough: The sports journalist unwilling to cover the ugly racist taunting of Orioles outfielder Adam Jones coming from the Fenway bleachers should hand in his guild card.
But as to the question of whether ESPN has become MSESPN, there are some who say that the sports network can’t be called “liberal.” Why not? Because “I don’t see them giving a damn about the environment,” Kelly McBride (who once “served in an ombudsman role at ESPN”) told Politico. If you’re worried about the new Las Vegas football stadium’s role in the further desertification of the Nevada desert, ESPN isn’t for you.
The anti-Trump “resistance” model, employed by CNN and the New York Times, standard-bearers of an openly and proudly partisan press, is paying dividends, for now. It seems to be in that spirit that McBride (these days an eminence in journalistic ethics at the Poynter Institute) advises that “not every story has two sides.” Except the entire premise of sports journalism is that there are always two sides, the home team and the other guys. Maybe political journalism could learn more from its sports sibling than the other way around.
