In a long May 2 piece, BuzzFeed.com found itself concerned over the attacks cable sports network ESPN has suffered from conservative websites and commentators upset over the sports network’s constant liberal bias. But, despite the attacks, the liberal clickbait site insisted that ESPN’s troubles have little to do with its left-wing politics.
For BuzzFeed, Steven Perlberg claimed that the conservative attacks began because of ESPN’s obsessive coverage of openly gay and quickly failed NFL player Michael Sam in May of 2014.
Perlberg noted that Sam’s story began when some “unnamed” source started pushing the tale that Sam’s sexual proclivity would hurt his chances in the draft. Then, once he won a spot with the St. Louis Rams as the 249th overall pick, cameras caught Sam’s reaction to finally making it to the big time. That video went viral because upon hearing of his status in the draft he turned to kiss his white boyfriend on live TV.
This, BuzzFeed insisted, is what sent conservatives on the attack:
But some conservatives also see the wall-to-wall coverage surrounding Michael Sam — who quickly flamed out from the league before stepping away from football in 2015 — as the beginning of ESPN as a liberal, agenda-driven TV network, which they argue is the source of the network’s declining subscriber base and financial problems. “MSNBC with footballs.” Sam was a middling player on the field, conservatives argue, so why did he receive outsize attention from the “worldwide leader in sports?”
“For media outlets on the right like like Breitbart, Heat Street, and National Review, ESPN’s bottom line is suffering because it abandoned middle America and has no idea that its core, white base is really pissed off,” Perlberg wrote.
BuzzFeed cited a long list of articles from conservative sites like Breitbart Sports and Daily Wire chronicling the recent layoffs at the sports network. For instance, the author cited a March article by Breitbart’s Dylan Gwinn who noted that, “It turns out that insulting and demeaning half the population does not make for a winning business strategy.”
The article also cited several other Breitbart Sports pieces reporting on ESPN’s layoffs. Several other conservative sites were also mentioned concerning the layoffs.
Perlberg didn’t just use Michael Sam and the ESPN layoffs to show how conservatives circled to poke at the cable network. He also pointed to ESPN’s coverage of gay basketball player Jason Collins, the absurd amount of support ESPN lavished upon anti-American protester and NFL player Colin Kaepernick, and the ESPY award so breathlessly bestowed on transgender figure Caitlyn Jenner. In the latter case, the former Olympian received the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage in sports despite the fact that Jenner hasn’t been in sports for decades.
There were other triggers, Perlberg noted:
Conservatives point to other instances at ESPN, too. In 2015, the network decided to yank a charity event from a Trump golf club weeks after then-candidate Donald Trump famously said some Mexican immigrants were “rapists.” Last year, ESPN analyst and former Red Sox star Curt Schilling — a legendary promoter of right-wing memes — was fired after sharing a derogatory Facebook post about the North Carolina transgender bathroom law.
In fact, even on the very day over 100 employees were getting fired, ESPN careened to the far left by allowing a feminist activist to post a poem dedicated to a cop killer on ESPNW.
The outcry against giving such space to someone who celebrated a cop killer was loud enough that the network quietly, and without initially explaining itself to fans, removed the poem a few hours after it originally went live.
It was some time before ESPN released a statement reading, “While the editors welcomed a contribution from a notable writer and chose it as a reflection of this one poet’s experience, upon further review we have decided it is not an appropriate selection for our site and have removed the piece from the feature.” This explanation did little to actually explain anything.
And, then there was ESPN’s insistence that as a corporation it sees “inclusion and diversity” not “as a political stance but as a human stance.”
Network President John Skipper added, “We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy.”
Clearly, ESPN has no intention at all of putting the brakes on its headlong drive to the political left.
Still, despite all the exposition, BuzzFeed insists that ESPN’s troubles have nothing at all to do with politics. It’s all about the industry’s difficulty adjusting to today’s trends in delivering entertainment.
“Media industry analysts on Wall Street caution that the network’s problems are about math, not politics,” Perlberg exclaimed:
ESPN is spending billions of dollars a year on expensive sports rights deals to air NFL, NBA, MLB, and college football games, long-running programming costs that will continue to be a major drag for years to come. At the same time, ESPN’s subscriber figures are falling as more Americans “cut the cord” and ditch their pricey cable packages for streaming options, “skinny bundles,” or nothing at all. Young people that networks and advertisers desperately try to reach are watching dunk highlights on Instagram, not SportsCenter. Scores and stats are easily available on mobile devices and across social media, unlike the golden 1990s and early 2000s when ESPN flourished. And a newer crop of digital sports media properties and personalities — like Big Cat and PFT Commenter from the Pardon My Take podcast — have captured the attention of college-aged sports fans in place of the larger than life ESPN talking heads of yore. The network has lost more than 10 million cable subscribers since 2011 when it had more than 100 million.
BuzzFeed went on to quote Rich Greenfield, a media industry analyst at BTIG, who said, “The challenge at ESPN is that subscribers are falling, eyeballs watching are falling, and they have way, way overspent on sports rights. They are scrambling to reduce costs. There is no other way to read it.”
However, BuzzFeed seems unwilling to accept that it could possibly be both reasons. There are no conservative critics of ESPN that pin its troubles solely on its liberal politics. Indeed, many of the very articles BuzzFeed cited also note the “cord cutting” problem facing cable TV, as well as the out-of-control costs for broadcasting rights for sports events.
Conservatives are simply saying that ESPN’s leftward tilt is also causing it a problem. No conservative commentator is saying the network’s politics is its only problem.
While conservatives are not characterizing ESPN’s troubles as an either-or proposition, BuzzFeed is. The liberal clickbait site seems to have firmly decided that ESPN’s habit of indulging a constant stream of liberal commentary has played no part at all in its downfall.
It is an assessment that fits BuzzFeed’s own liberal agenda.
But, others do see the cable network’s problem. Indeed, a new poll finds that conservative and moderate viewers are leaving ESPN in droves because they are sick and tired of the liberalism ladled over the top of their sports coverage.
A new YouGov poll recently found that the idea that ESPN has become a bastion of liberalism is now an accepted truth among conservatives, and that feeling has “contributed to their diminished view of the sports network.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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