It has been clear that racial politics have infected ESPN’s content, but it turns out that that same toxic worldview has taken root behind the scenes as well. It is most apparent among the network’s employees who cover the NBA.
Witness a recent saga involving ESPN reporters Rachel Nichols and Maria Taylor. The biggest takeaway from it is that there are no sympathetic figures. Nichols felt she was snubbed from hosting the network’s NBA Finals coverage because Taylor is black, and ESPN was trying to correct for some lack of diversity. Nichols also thinks that she has had a hard time at ESPN as a woman because the network is run by “white conservative male Trump voters” and discussed a response to this feud by blaming ESPN for pitting two women against each other for the same job.
This leaked audio conveniently happened to emerge when Taylor’s contract is three weeks away from expiring. (An edited 4-minute video had been leaked to Deadspin last year, though Deadspin said nothing of Taylor or the contents of the video.) ESPN reportedly had offered her a contract last year that would pay her around $5 million per year, up from her current $1 million salary, but Taylor had rejected that.
Taylor has previously shamed the network over the skin color of its broadcast team for the NCAA women’s March Madness tournament. Like Nichols, Taylor fully buys into the view that race and gender are preeminent matters.
And they aren’t alone in this. Jalen Rose, who is fresh off a failed attempt at race-baiting, said that black employees would no longer extend their credibility to the company, according to anonymous sources who spoke to the New York Times. Adrian Wojnarowski also chimed in during meetings with ESPN executives to call Nichols a bad teammate.
To highlight just how toxic ESPN has become, former ESPN employee Amin Elhassan later jumped in to accuse Wojnarowski of racism, accusing him of sabotaging the careers of black NBA insiders to protect his own job.
As a result of all of this, Nichols is no longer the network’s sideline reporter for its coverage of the NBA Finals, a role she had throughout the playoffs. During that time, ESPN had prerecorded Nichols’s segments to avoid having her and Taylor interact. It’s high school drama but infused with racial politics and occurring at the “worldwide leader in sports.”
Much like the mess that is the New York Times, ESPN sounds like a miserable place to work, all because the institution has rotted at the hands of progressive politics. It was clear that ESPN’s on-air and written content was suffering thanks to the network’s political turn, but this peek behind the curtain shows that the problem goes much deeper.
