Business is business for ESPN, and that business is money not politics
ESPN realized that alienating your audience when your business is about making money is a bad thing- and that the silent viewers of ESPN are needed just as much as their vocal ones
It's been a wild ride for ESPN over the past few years. Disney's flagship sports and entertainment vehicle has been stumped by disappearing viewers, declining ratings, and massive layoffs in recent times, attributed to viewers' cord cutting habits and if you believe some, their penchant for letting a few former/current anchors push political discussions alongside sports coverage. The latter is an entirely different mess that has been discussed ad nauseam, and while I personally don't mind that ESPN used their sports platform to discuss important political topics, I also don't mind that ESPN's current President, James Pitaro, has made a conscious effort to tone down this rhetoric. Pitaro discussed ESPN's change in a recent interview with the LA Times, discussing among many things, satisfying;
"ESPN’s more traditional fans by steering commentators away from political discussions on-air and on social media, which heightened during President Trump’s criticism of NFL player protests against social injustice during the playing of the national anthem."
This hasn't sat well with Deadspin's Laura Wagner however, who went to town on Pitaro and ESPN's decision by calling it 'keeping the old whites happy'. In her piece, she says that Pitaro's line about "confused" anchors was a "cheap shot" at former anchor Jemele Hill and current outcast Michael Smith (both bore the brunt of the political backlash at the height of the Colin Kaepernick saga). While Pitaro may have leveled a cheap shot at Hill, my issue with Wags' piece is that she fails to see this as anything but a capitulation to the so-called 'conservative' viewers of ESPN. She labels ESPN's traditional fans as "the older, whiter segments of ESPN’s audience"- which frankly, isn't true.
What is a traditional ESPN fan? People who like sports. Sports fans. Who may or may not occasionally cross over to the demographics she labels as "older" and "white". However, like any rash generalization, it is ridiculous to think that all traditional ESPN fans are old or white. Okay, I'm a little old, but I'm not white, and I would classify myself as a traditional ESPN fan. Why? Because I like sports and I like sports coverage. I also like political coverage, and I like that we have multitudes of options to find good political coverage no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. I just don't need to find it on ESPN necessarily.
The problem with Wagner is that she feels as though ESPN's decision to cull back on the network's Jemele-ness is anything but a business decision. She goes as far as calling it "a chilling vision of the future of the network". Good grief Wags. Her stating that Pitaro has asked his anchors to dumb down "so that morons who set their Nikes on fire will stop getting mad when they turn on ESPN" is as ludicrous as the statement about the future of the network.
ESPN is smart enough to know that they will get in bed with politics when it makes sense for the bottom dollar, and ESPN (and Pitaro), are smart enough to know that when that hurts your ratings (and ultimately that bottom dollar), you best get out of said bed. Perhaps ESPN realized that in business, the silent audiences still hold a lot of sway. It is a lesson Australian politics learned this past weekend when the silent voters of Australia ultimately became a big part of the election results. Maybe ESPN realized that alienating your audience when your business is about making money is a bad thing- and that the silent viewers of ESPN are needed just as much as their vocal ones.