A TV network is accused of political bias: hardly a surprise in 2017. But what if the network is a sports broadcaster?

An unusual strain of partisanship — at least in the sports corner of the news media — emerged last week after ESPN announced it was laying off dozens of employees. The public reaction included jeers toward the network for what some viewers perceived as a leftward slant in ESPN’s coverage, a reflection of how the country’s raw political nerves and cultural divisions have spilled over into a world that many value as a pristine redoubt from worldly concerns: sports.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports who is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies. “I think people are looking for bias, and opinion, and information that in some way involves some hidden signal or indication that there’s a political bias in one direction or another.”

It is not as if American sports and politics have never intersected. From Jackie Robinson’s breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier to Billie Jean King’s fight for gender equality in tennis to John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, many moments and figures in sports history mark social mileposts.