With Donald Trump in the White House, 2017 was an intense and challenging year for so many people and organizations. ESPN found itself at the center of that storm.
When then-ESPN personality Jemele Hill tweeted that Trump was a “white supremacist,” it poured gasoline on the “stick to sports” discussion and kickstarted the company’s attempt to communicate that it would remove politics from its sports coverage (which, as we all know, is impossible). This way, after all, one year after Colin Kaepernick began his national anthem protest, something Trump seized on to fight his culture war.
Joel Anderson was a college football writer with ESPN at that time. In a piece for Slate, the Slow Burn host recounts what it was like to work for the Worldwide Leader at the time, the extensive efforts they made to try and counteract conservative criticism, and how it seems as though they’ve given up on policing politics recently as financial concerns have taken the forefront.
Anderson, who was with ESPN between 2017 and 2019, recalls “a parade of ESPN executives and personalities” rolling out presentations to the staff about new policies, including a new social media policy that mandated they “avoid outright partisanship and seek permission before commenting on political or social issues on the air or on social media.”
ESPN president John Skipper led those presentations, though ironically, he was gone a week later, resigning due to an extortion attempt over his drug problems.
Those policies might have stuck for a little while, but as Anderson notes, they’ve long since been abandoned. Now, Aaron Rodgers appears weekly on The Pat McAfee Show where you never know what he might have to say about vaccines, politics, conspiracy theories, and COVID-19 denialism. Meanwhile, Stephen A. Smith routinely wades into politics on his podcast and has even endorsed presidential candidates (while complaining that ESPN used to do too much politics). And NFL Countdown host Sam Ponder focuses much of her social media presence wading into the transgender athlete discussion that has become a dog whistle for conservatives.
Anderson compares that to the time in 2018 when he was called during a vacation by an editor who wanted to make sure he didn’t tweet anything about Roseanne Barr’s racist comments (Barr was fired from her TV show, which aired on ABC, a Disney company).
“It’s not that I wanted to tweet about Roseanne Barr and her racist tweets. It’s that I now knew part of the bargain would require constant reminders to understand my place in the company,” wrote Anderson. I’d worked in journalism for more than 15 years by then; I knew how to keep most of my opinions out of print. But I didn’t want to be constantly monitored like an overactive schoolboy.”
Anderson delves a lot into how ESPN shifted focus toward an ever-increasingly shaky financial future, which meant in part sacrificing those concerns in the name of attracting larger audiences. These days, he doesn’t see the panic he remembers in 2017 following Hill’s comments. Beyond that, he’s also realized that stripping politics out of its programming was never actually the point, even if they made such a big deal out of it.
“That meeting in 2017 was about coming to the realization that, now and for the immediate future, ESPN is running out of time and money like the rest of us,” wrote Anderson. “It was an existential cry for help—it just hadn’t figured out where that cry should be directed yet.”
[Slate]