Somewhere along the way, the world leader in sports became a blowhard in politics.
Instead of confining itself to broadcasting games, reporting scores, and breaking down the big plays, ESPN now imposes political commentary on its viewers. The network’s left-wing moral posturing got so bad this week that Jemele Hill, anchor of “SportsCenter,” didn’t balk at attacking the president explicitly as a white supremacist. Thanks, Hill, but if we wanted political commentary, we wouldn’t turn to a sports channel to get it.
By the same token, however, if we wanted unwarranted, hair-trigger retaliation, we’d prefer that it didn’t come from the White House, as it did.
Hill said of Trump on Twitter that he is “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” This idiotic charge sparked a justifiable outrage. Hill apologized, which was the least she could do, but not before White House officials had called for her to be sacked.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, speaking at the press room podium on Thursday, decried the tweet as “a fireable offense,” and on Friday, the president added the weight of his office to this stupid spat by demanding ESPN “apologize for untruth.”
ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017
Trump should not waste a second castigating a sports channel’s pipsqueak employee. He should, rather obviously, be focused instead on such things as the Republican legislative agenda languishing in Congress, and the nuclear threat escalating on the Korean Peninsula.
Although the White House intervention is not direct censorship, it smacks of an effort to chill speech, and that is something no administration should do. Networks are taxed, regulated, and under the thumb of the federal government, and they shouldn’t have to worry about whether the president likes their coverage.
Pressed on this matter on Friday, Sanders changed tack and said, “The point is that ESPN has been hypocritical. They should hold anchors to a fair and consistent standard. ESPN suspended a longtime anchor Linda Cohn not too long ago for expressing a political viewpoint.”
This may be true, but it is beside the central point that public officials should not comment on whom a private company should hire or fire. ESPN suspended Cohn for political remarks, fired Rush Limbaugh, and benched other commentators for offenses against political correctness. Perhaps that’s part of their business model, and one suspects it isn’t very savvy, but that’s a decision for the Walt Disney Company’s shareholders, not for public officials.
Viewers who don’t like what ESPN has to offer can tune out, as many already have. ESPN subscriptions have dropped 13 percent, from 100 million in 2011 to 87 million today. Perhaps if ESPN stuck to sports, it could reverse this slump. We wish it would. But we also wish Team Trump would not stoop so low. It’s undignified and, more importantly, it’s constitutionally improper.
