ESPN has devolved into a steaming pile of progressivism.
The sports network decided it was more important to be “woke” than to report on the sports news of the day.
Now the network has sunk to a new low with a terrible race-baiting, anti-American comment about the United States.
ESPN has been hemorrhaging viewers for years. The challenging landscape of cable television has led to fewer people subscribing, but ESPN accelerated their decline by making a commitment to left-wing politics.
Bob Iger, chairman of ESPN’s parent company Disney, is an unabashed liberal who has quietly considered a run for the presidency.
Disney’s left-wing politics have filtered down into ESPN, which was at its zenith when it was purely a sports channel.
But lately the channel has made it a point to promote shows and hosts who lecture about politics, and almost exclusively from a liberal agenda.
Popular conservative voices like Curt Schilling, Mike Ditka, and Britt McHenry were excised from the network for espousing right-of-center viewers.
Meanwhile, progressives like Jemele Hill were elevated and protected despite inflammatory statements such as calling the Trump administration “white supremacists.”
ESPN also let go of ombudsman Jim Brady not long after he chronicled the stifling leftist atmosphere at the network. Brady even pointed out that employees were afraid to put the break-room television on Fox News for fear of backlash.
However, the contemporary saying “go woke, go broke” has applied to the network. The dedication to liberalism led to a steep decline in ratings for their flagship show, SportsCenter.
Once progressives Hill and Michael Smith were replaced with Kevin Negandhi and conservative host Sage Steele, the ratings quickly turned around.
One would think ESPN learned their lesson, but they didn’t.
The network dumped millions of dollars into the ratings graveyard “Get Up!” a morning show hosted by Mike Greenberg, Michelle Beadle, and Jalen Rose.
Greenberg adamantly promised “Get Up!” would provide sports commentary without overbearing politics, but the show just couldn’t help itself.
In light of three MLB players who were recently exposed for making insensitive tweets almost a decade ago when they were in high school, Rose unleashed a rant about how racist America is.
Rose said:
“The trend besides the fact that all of these are white American men, that most likely grew up in the United States, literally, the offenses of the tweets actually were similar in either they offended gays or they were anti-racial sentiments towards minorities, in particular blacks…When I see the trend, and I understand certain terms have been used as dog whistles in our society: ‘Make America Great Again,’ ‘America’s pastime.’ And a lot of times that gets overblown, that gets overlooked. And I don’t care that somebody is only quote-unquote 17 years old.”
The left loves to label everything they don’t like a “dog whistle” to the nebulous “far right” that’s supposedly everywhere.
If “Make America Great Again” is a dog whistle, apparently only liberals can hear it. Donald Trump did better among black and Hispanic voters than did Mitt Romney in 2012.
And “America’s pastime” is simply a nickname for baseball. Implying that baseball is racist flies way overboard into radical leftism.
Not exactly what Mike Greenberg promised before “Get Up!” launched.
The statements by the players that Rose is referencing were definitely stupid, but so are 17-year-olds.
People who didn’t come of age in the social media era have the luxury of not having their idiotic foibles posted online for posterity.
Rose should give that more weight before using three Twitter incidents to determine that the sport of baseball and the entire country are racist.