POLITICS + SPORTS = BAD FOR BUSINESS
Why would ESPN want to give Trump-loving viewers an excuse to change channels?
Blame it on John Adams. He’s the one who told his wife in 1776 that U.S. independence should be commemorated with “shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward evermore.” Games and sports have been intertwined with the very idea of America — and fans of differing ideologies have been crashing into one another — ever since.
Even so, it was surprising last week when ESPN SportsCenter host Jemele Hill accused President Trump on Twitter of being a “white supremacist” and argued that Trump’s rise was the “direct result of white supremacy.” Responding to a commenter, Hill wrote: “Trump is a bigot. Glad you could live with voting for him. I couldn’t, because I cared about more than just myself.”
Hill’s tweets riled Trump supporters, who believed she was calling them white supremacists. The president’s spokeswoman called her words a “fireable offense.” ESPN offered a flaccid response, saying Hill’s actions had been “inappropriate,” and Hill said her comments “painted ESPN in an unfair light.”
Hill is perfectly within her rights to think whatever she wants. Many of the charges she made against Trump are unfortunately true. White supremacist groups appear to be gaining prominence, and the president has been woefully inadequate in condemning them. There’s no doubt that as a woman of color, her opinions reflect those of many African Americans.
MILLIONS OF SUBSCRIBERS
Problem is, a spokesperson for a company doesn’t get to demeanpotential customers. An employee doesn’t have the privilege of deciding who is fit to be a customer, especially when a company is struggling to keep the patrons it already has. If the woman who plays Snow White at Disney World spent her nights tweeting about the snotty brats she had to deal with, not even Prince Charming could save her job.
For ESPN, the situation is dire. Last year, the network lost nearly 3 million subscribers, so now seems like a bad time to have an employee try to drive half its remaining viewership away.
When young people are discontinuing cable subscriptions in favor of streaming options, ESPN would be doing well to simply retain the viewers it has — but the network is now handing the cus- tomers an excuse to bail.
Perhaps the most pressing political issue for the network is the wild fluctuation in punishments meted out to employees who cross the line into politics. For instance, Hill was allowed to skate. But according to sports fan website AwfulAnnouncing.com, network legend Linda Cohn was told to “take a day off ” to “think about how her comments affected the network” after telling a pair of radio DJs that ESPN’s embrace of politics had hurt the network with its “core” viewers.
ROBERT LEE AND CAITLYN
And of course, there are ESPN’sdisastrous forays into “wokeness.” Last month, it became a national laughingstock when it pulled announcer Robert Lee from a telecast in Charlottesville, Va., because he shared his name with the Confederate general.
Conservatives rolled their eyes in 2015 when the ESPYS granted transgender Caitlyn Jenner a “courage” award over a teenage girl who had died of brain cancer, and earlier this year when espnW ran a poem dedicated to convicted cop killer Assata Shakur.
“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense,” wrote famous polemicist H.L. Mencken. And it”s true — sports provides us the most exhilaration when we lock away our ability to think rationally. But we can afford to be irrational about sports because ultimately, the results don’t matter all that much.
Media organizations in need of eyeballs, however, can’t afford to lose their common sense or the whole empire could go down. Typically, insulting the very people a media outlet wants to keep buying its product has tended to be a suboptimal business strategy — but a reader as smart and goodlooking as you clearly already knew that.
Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.