Indoctrination by ESPN (Andrew McCarthy, National Review Online)

If conservatives want to know why we are losing the culture and the country, it is important to understand that while very few kids and young adults are watching Fox News (or news programs of any kind, for that matter), they inhale sports programming. It’s ubiquitous — television, radio, the Internet. And thus equally unavoidable is sports commentary, more and more of which has less and less to do with sports. Tendentious “sports journalists,” the majority of whom are decidedly left of center, are much less guarded about their hostility to conservatives than their fellow progressives on the political beat. It is a hostility that takes for granted the chummy agreement of its viewers and is designed to make Millennials want to be part of the fun.

This week, the big national news is a sports story. It involves Ray Rice. The star running-back was cut by the Baltimore Ravens after video surfaced showing him punching his now-wife’s lights out in an Atlantic City casino elevator. The National Football League and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, are in the hot seat because, some allege, the NFL had the video before suspending Rice for a measly two games. Logically, the video shouldn’t matter: The commissioner clearly knew Rice had knocked Janay Palmer out cold before issuing the trifling suspension. But graphic video has a way of overrunning logic.

Excerpt from the transcript:

NEGANDHI: “Yeah, you mentioned this. So, how would you describe, or how would you change this culture, if it’s not a yes or no, black and white issue, and there is that gray area?”

FAGAN: “Well, I think right now we’re talking so much about firing Goodell or punishments — should it be a three game, a two game, a six game, a full year ban. But I think that’s a little reactive and not pro-active. Domestic violence is something that happens in anger, in the moment. It’s very unlikely that perpetrators of domestic violence are worried about whether it will be a two, a six, a 12-game suspension. This is behavior that is happening at the grassroots level that is born through years of our culture like raising men to want to not be like women and using language like ‘sissy’ and ‘you throw like a girl’ that demean women. These are all contributing factors and I think if we want to hold the NFL’s feet to the fire over this issue, we shouldn’t be looking at the number of game suspensions because I don’t really think that’s going to change the problem. I think holding NFL’s feet to the fire should mean getting them to throw the kitchen sink at domestic violence, to invest millions of dollars in grassroots organizations in going into middle schools and high schools and colleges, and talking to young men about dealing with anger, about how they treat women. I think that’s where you’re going to see change. I think that right now all of this reactive behavior is not going to change it, as much as going in and going into the school systems and the younger spaces and really reprogramming how we raise men.”