ESPN Hits a New Low
Two recent scandals reveal the rot at the core of the Worldwide Leader in Sports.
Dear readers,
In our final edition of 2023, we asked if sports are still political, as leagues and athletes crawl back into their apolitical holes. Well, the first weeks of 2024 have seen some high-profile clashes between sports and politics — though they’re not necessarily the kind that we were hoping for. Our piece this week is about one particular clash at ESPN. Happy reading.
-Ian and Calder
The Worldwide Leader in Sports is having a rough couple of weeks.
On January 2, sidelined New York Jets quarterback and all-around cartoon villain Aaron Rodgers used one of his recurring appearances on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” to baselessly accuse late-night host Jimmy Kimmel of being an associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
For some background, Rodgers’ beef with Kimmel stems from the pandemic, when Kimmel would often joke about Rodgers dodging questions about his vaccination status. Rogers’ accusations — which turned out not to be true — sparked a firestorm of criticism. But rather than apologize to Kimmel, Rodgers doubled down, continuing to complain about Kimmel giving a platform to Anthony Fauci during the pandemic. On January 10, McAfee announced that Rogers’ recurrent segment, called “Aaron Rogers Tuesday,” would be canceled for the rest of the year. But then, just a day after McAfee’s announcement, Rodgers was back on the show to discuss Bill Belichick’s retirement, sparking another round of controversy.
McAfee responded by claiming that Rodgers will only be an occasional guest on the show from now on, but that’s all sort of beside the point. With Rodgers continuing to appear on McAfee’s show, it’s clear that ESPN has more or less resigned itself to allowing Rodgers to use its airwaves to slader his enemies, spread hair-brained theories about the pandemic, and recommend the collected works of RFK Jr.
But the news just got worse for ESPN when, on Jan. 11, The Athletic reported that ESPN had used fake names to secure Emmys for some of its biggest stars.
This story verges on the utterly ridiculous. Because the National Television Academy of Arts and Sciences’s rules prevent on-air personalities from winning production awards, ESPN submitted fake “associate producers” whose names were similar to their on-air talent — then they re-engraved the awards. (Kirk Herbstreit was called “Kirk Henry,” Lee Corso was “Lee Clark,” Desmond Howard was “Dirk Howard,” and on down the line.) In response, the network was required to return 37 doctored awards.
On their face, these two stories appear to have little to do with one another, aside from the fact that they both involve ESPN. But in reality, they are both symptoms of the rot that has set it at the core of the network. In recent years, ESPN has abandoned the (already transparently silly) pretense that it is a serious news organization dedicated to covering the sporting world. The writing was on the walls during the Trump years when the network punished its reporters who broke the company’s gag order on political topics. In more recent years, though, ESPN has filled its ranks with people like McAfee, a former football player turned professional wrestler turned Barstool-style shock jock. ESPN explicitly hired McAfee to boost its ratings with young, male fans, but when McAfee — who has a longstanding relationship with Rodgers — ultimately delivered on his promise to really shock ESPN’s viewers, the suits got a little nervous . . . but not nervous enough to change course. You get what you pay for, after all.
The same rot is apparently in the Emmys controversy. Cheating, of course, is bad — but the type of cheating that ESPN engaged in here is especially telling. The network fudged some names to soothe the egos of its on-air talent — and, more specifically, of the brick-headed dudes who host its “College Gameday” football program (which at one point included McAfee). You don’t have to be a regular ESPN viewer to know that these guys are not the crème de la journalistic crème. They’re the assholes in the ugly suits who you mute until the game comes on again. Yet these are, apparently, the people that ESPN will lie, cheat, and steal to keep happy. That tells you just about everything you need to know about the network’s priorities.
This all points to the broader issue at ESPN and in the world of sports media more generally. ESPN claims that its ban on politics-related coverage serves the higher purpose of maintaining its role as a neutral, apolitical provider of sports news and entertainment. But what the ban actually does is attract the most reactionary cranks and charlatans in the sports media world and then provide them with cover to launder their right-wing views as “shocking opinions” and “controversial takes.” Over time, that breeds a culture of deception — and, ultimately, of self-deception — that infects the entire organization, as the Emmy scandal proves.
We can’t believe we’re saying this, but if this is how ESPN deals with the easy stuff, we’d ask that ESPN at least stick to sports. We’ll handle the politics.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . an epic soccer saga? “The footballers who escaped one of the most dangerous countries on Earth,” by Simon Huges in The Athletic (Jan. 11, 2024).
. . . the Olympics’ silence on the conflict in Israel? “Will the IOC Do Anything About the Killing of Palestinian Athletes?” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (Jan. 10, 2024).