Outkick, a sports blog, has an interesting post on ESPN’s announcement that it will by laying off over 100 employees, and downsizing others. It delves into the fact that ESPN has decided to become a political channel, but it properly recognizes that this was really always a symptom, rather than the cause of its downfall:
ESPN’s business is collapsing and the network is desperately trying to find a way to stay above water. You know how a drowning person flails in the water before slipping under? ESPN’s left-wing shift is that flailing. They think going left wing will save them. The reality is the opposite, ESPN going left wing was like giving a drowning person a big rock to hold and thinking it would keep them from drowning. Instead, it just made them sink even faster.
That’s why ratings are down 16% this year compared to last year and viewers are abandoning the network in droves.
Middle America wants to pop a beer and listen to sports talk, they don’t want to be lectured about why Caitlyn Jenner is a hero, Michael Sam is the new Jackie Robinson of sports, and Colin Kaepernick is the Rosa Parks of football. ESPN made the mistake of trying to make liberal social media losers happy and as a result lost millions of viewers.
I think this is about right. Going left isn’t what killed ESPN — it’s just accelerating its demise.
I didn’t stop watching ESPN because it adopted preachy liberalism, although I’m sure some people did. I’d mostly stopped watching it already. For me, the highlights I used to depend on it for (ah, the days of NFL Primetime!) are now more readily available online for viewing at my own leisure. Even with respect to commentary, where ESPN used to be just about the only game in town, there’s now enough competition that it hardly justifies the expense of a cable package for it.
My kids and I follow the Cubs, and MLB.com does a laudable job of providing video highlights in real time for all of the teams online, for free, with a full compilation coming on YouTube within an hour or two of each game ending. While I’m online, I can even look at the box score. And there’s the added advantage that I don’t have to sit through boring stuff about American League teams.
What’s more, there’s a lot of sports commentary just in the course of a single baseball game, especially if you listen to radio announcers. That’s relatively cheap ($20 a year) if you pick up an MLB.com audio subscription. (For example, I learned about and heard a nice discussion of the suspension of the Pirates’ Starling Marte while listening to a Cubs-Reds game.) And with the $113 annual subscription, you can actually watch the games with the radio announcers’ audio overlaid. We used to do that manually, in the old days, when Harry Caray stepped into the radio booth for a few innings, but now the commentary and the action are actually synched!
I enjoy listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer, and it’s cheap. Why would I pay more than $1,000 a year to make sure I have access to commentary from somebody I don’t know at ESPN?
When we cut the cord on cable (we still depend on it for Internet, unfortunately) I expected my sports viewership to suffer, or that at least I’d have to go to the bar for a lot of big games. My NFL viewing has probably suffered (their online service is not nearly as useful) but I’m out of market for my ancestral team (the Buffalo Bills) and rarely had a chance to watch their games beforehand anyway.
(We’ll see what happens next summer during the World Cup, but I’m just as happy watching that in Spanish.)
In any case, I can completely see why ESPN is under pressure, left-wing politics aside. And also how the politics could be the cure that’s worsening the disease.
