On Friday, ESPN announced that it had signed a new contract with Keith Olbermann that will give the far-Left former MSNBC, Current TV, and GQ host an expanded role with the flailing network. According to USA Today, Olbermann will now anchor Sportscenter some 20 times per year. Olbermann, who has now finally reached the pinnacle of his career – right back where he started, with the same role – put on a happy face: “Since we started this, my sixth separate tenure with ESPN, in January, I’ve found the variety of assignments to be the most fun and energizing of all my stints. Adding stuff, like being a rookie 59-year-old play-by-play guy, plus the Rip Van Winkle of Sportscenter, only adds to the smorgasbord. Can’t wait, and at my age, I shouldn’t.”
This is just the latest indicator that ESPN’s leftward-leaning politics will continue for the foreseeable future. Over the past decade, ESPN has morphed from a network focused largely on highlights and analysis into a political debate channel – MSNBC with footballs. Conservatives have been all-but-excised, while leftists have been granted an ever-increasing presence. How many ESPN anchors, for example, actually believe that NFL players shouldn’t be kneeling for the national anthem? And how many expressed that opinion – shared by a vast majority of Americans – on the air? See, for example, ESPN’s Jemele Hill, who was briefly suspended by the network for calling President Trump a “white supremacist” and who suggested boycotting the NFL, had a lucrative stint on the Sportscenter 6 p.m. show; she’ll be moving to their site, The Undefeated, which focuses “on the intersection of race and sports.” Surely, that will be a traffic magnet. Or the network’s focus on gun control after the Parkland massacre – on a sports network.
ESPN’s coverage hasn’t just skewed politically – it’s skewed in terms of the sports covered. As I wrote a year ago:
ESPN sees the growing base of the network as more heavily minority and therefore leftist. ESPN has focused heavily on the NBA in recent years – a sport with a massively growing black and Latino fan base, according to Nielsen — at the expense of sports like hockey, with its overwhelmingly white fan base. For example, in 2012, Sportcenter spent 23.3 percent of its time on the NFL, 19.2 percent of its time on the NBA, 16.8 percent of its time on baseball, and just 2.7 percent of its time on the NHL and 2.1 percent on NASCAR, according to Deadspin. Note the skew toward the NBA here. According to a 2015 Harris poll, here are the most popular sports in America: football (33 percent), baseball (15 percent), college football (10 percent), NASCAR (6 percent), hockey (5 percent) and the NBA (five percent). In other words, ESPN is clearly making a decision based not on broad appeal of particular sports – they’re no longer broadcasting, they’re narrowcasting, focusing on squeezing additional minutes out of what they perceive to be their core audience. This creates a self-fulfilling feedback loop that promotes leftist politics: get good ratings with heavier minority viewers, pander to them with leftist politics, drive away the other viewers, and then double down on what remains. There’s a reason ESPN treated Colin Kaepernick as a hero while the rest of the country saw him as a nincompoop.
So welcome back, Olbermann. It’s like you never left MSNBC. They just added some occasional crosstalk about golf.