Ben Strauss is the co-author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, winner of the 2017 PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing.

Last week, ESPN, often referred to as the Worldwide Leader in Sports, laid off around 100 employees. The cuts were painfully public and claimed the jobs of some of the top talent and most familiar faces at the network. At the heart of the latest downsizing, as with earlier layoffs, is math: The network has committed billions of dollars to broadcast live sports, and waves of cord-cutters now threaten the cash flow to pay those bills. But amid the hand-wringing over the cable giant’s business outlook, a subplot has begun to dominate the coverage: ESPN’S politics.

“[The] collapse has been aided by ESPN's absurd decision to turn into MSESPN, a left wing sports network,” wrote Clay Travis on Wednesday. “ESPN made the mistake of trying to make liberal social media losers happy and as a result lost millions of viewers.”


For several years now, Travis has been one of the loudest, most persistent antagonists of ESPN on the internet, haranguing the behemoth sports network in much the same way that right-wing disrupters have lobbied against the political media establishment. Among Travis’ biggest gripes: ESPN heaped laudatory coverage on Michael Sam, an openly gay football player, while firing Curt Schilling for a series of incendiary remarks. The network honored Caitlyn Jenner with its Arthur Ashe Courage Award after she came out as a trans woman, and then moved a company event away from a Donald Trump golf course. In debating former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, Paul Finebaum, a widely respected college football commentator, said on his ESPN radio show, “This country is not oppressing black people.” After a public outcry, Finebaum appeared on SportsCenter to apologize. (There was also the prime-time TV show hosted by the left-leaning Keith Olbermann that ran from 2013-15.)

And Travis is not alone. National Review, the Washington Examiner and, of course, Breitbart have all weighed in to accuse ESPN of partisanship.

By the end of last week, Deep Root, a media analytics firm that does work for Republicans, published a study that suggested that politics have affected ESPN’s audience. According to Deep Root, which matched voter files and set-top box data, ESPN’s viewers in Cincinnati were majority Republican in 2015; in 2016, they skewed Democratic.

ESPN has not tried to hide its social agenda, but it couches it as transcending politics. “We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy,” ESPN President John Skipper told ESPN ombudsman Jim Brady in December when he was asked whether the perceived political shift was real or intentional. In the same column, Brady quoted an anonymous conservative employee as saying, “If you’re a Republican or conservative, you feel the need to talk in whispers. There’s even a fear of putting Fox News on a TV [in the office].” He concluded that ESPN could stand to offer more diverse viewpoints on the air.

None of this is to say that politics was the direct cause of ESPN’s layoffs. It wasn’t. “You’re looking at a changing business; that’s the driving factor here,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at financial services firm BTIG. Over the past four years, ESPN has lost around 12 million subscribers. Some of them are people who don’t watch sports on TV and now have the option to purchase skinnier cable bundles, which is especially painful because ESPN gets more than $7 per subscriber, the most of any channel.

But as ESPN responds to a new era of millennial media habits to shore up its bottom line, it must also wrestle with the relative appetite of its viewers for political debate in a space that often has been considered—mistakenly—as a refuge from the contentious questions that dominate the political realm. If the network embraces a more explicitly political style of programming, then it must contend with the same issues of balance and objectivity as an explicitly news-oriented media outlet. Of course, the very nature of the hyperpartisan climate means that some segments of the viewing public may already have made up their mind.

“You go to rural Wisconsin, you go to Pueblo County, Colorado—there are people who hate us, the elite media,” said Poynter’s media critic Jim Warren. “It’s a visceral disdain that gives me no satisfaction, but an award for Caitlyn Jenner reflects a liberal ethos that dominates American journalism. It’s not just in politics; it seems to be in sports now, too.”

***

Travis, 38, is an unlikely critic of perceived liberal bias. Before he began to dissect ESPN’s corporate decisions, he actually dabbled in Democratic politics. A Nashville native, he attended George Washington University from 1997 to 2001 and interned on Capitol Hill in the office of Democratic Congressman Bob Clement. He spent a summer working on Al Gore’s presidential campaign in Tennessee. “One of the first offices Gore opened, I was there,” Travis told me this week. After a brief career as a lawyer—he did mostly defense work for large companies—Travis quit his job to be a sports journalist and eventually founded a website called Outkick the Coverage in 2011.

Today, Travis hosts a national radio show for Fox—an ESPN competitor—in addition to writing for his website. He can be outlandish on Twitter and his regular Periscope video segments, and one of his favorite topics is predicting the demise of ESPN. When I spoke with him, he regularly touted his page views. “Everything I write does well,” he told me when I asked whether attacking ESPN was good for his business. (Travis’ arguments against ESPN have brought plenty of their own criticism, as well.)

Travis’ theory is that politics at ESPN is a symptom rather than a cause of the changing business landscape. For years, ESPN’s flagship show, SportsCenter, built its success by offering sports highlights that couldn’t be found anywhere else. But now highlights are available on-demand and in real time. Greenfield, the media analyst, agrees that ESPN has had to adapt. “SportsCenter, which is half of ESPN’s programming, doesn’t work the way it used to,” he said. “So now you have to stand out in the marketplace—and you have to figure out how you do that.”

ESPN has made no secret of its attempts to evolve by promoting debate shows and opinion on its airwaves. So in a politically charged time, it makes sense that the network has become more political, as hosts and talking heads are expected to provide hours and hours of hot takes. As athletes have increased their political activism—from Colin Kaepernick to LeBron James—politics has become even more of a focal point. But the question persists: Are the on-air hosts pushing an agenda or covering a beat where the subjects themselves are using their celebrity to advance liberal causes?

Travis believes the vast majority of sports fans don’t want politics mixing with their sports, but that seems an impossible ask when athletes and leagues are entering the political arena with such regularity (Travis also talks a lot about politics, himself). But he loathes the reflexively liberal take on issues like HB2, the North Carolina bathroom bill that prompted an NCAA boycott and the attendant demonization of conservative views. When an ESPN host equated the bathroom bill with lunch counter segregation, he believes the network was obligated to offer airtime to someone who supported the bill.

“My personal belief is that people should use whatever bathroom they want,” he said. “But is there a violent outcry against people trying to use the bathroom? No. It’s laughable to compare the two.” I asked Travis whether ESPN should hire someone like Jeffrey Lord, CNN’s Trump surrogate who has called Trump the Martin Luther King Jr. of health care, to offer opinions, however unpopular, to ensure a standard of two-sided journalism. “Absolutely,” he said.

That person in the sports world, though, could be someone like Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher and outspoken conservative who said Hillary Clinton should be buried under a jail. And ESPN fired him.

***

From 2011 to 2012, Kelly McBride served in an ombudsman role at ESPN as part of the Poynter Review Project, and she watched ESPN prepare for the moment when it would cover gay athletes. “There were editorial decisions made; they weren’t going to be activists, but they were going to cover it and cover it well. They had style meetings [about transgender people]. I was impressed by it.”

McBride added that on race relations, the network has always had a progressive view, if for no other reason than many of its employees and the athletes it covers are minorities. But she scoffed at the idea that ESPN could be uniformly liberal. “If you want to call someone a liberal, there’s a certain amount of orthodoxy. I don’t see them giving a damn about the environment, so what you’re left with is sexual orientation and race. That’s where they’ve put down a marker.”

To her point, some of ESPN’s recent programming could be viewed as appealing more to conservatives. That includes exhaustive coverage of Tim Tebow, an evangelical Christian, and then hiring him as an analyst. Will Cain, a conservative pundit, was also hired. A “30 for 30” documentary examined how a district attorney in Durham, North Carolina—and the national media—got the Duke lacrosse rape accusations wrong in 2006, and another ESPN film told the story of George W. Bush's ceremonial first pitch during the World Series at Yankee Stadium after 9/11. Last month, the company issued a new company policy that stressed that all political conversations on the air must be rooted in sports.

When I asked McBride about the Deep Root study that showed Republican viewers defecting, she was deeply skeptical. For example, was the conservative migration away from ESPN worse than other non-cable news stations, as audiences on Fox and CNN skyrocketed? ESPN commissioned its own study last year through Langer Research Associates. The study found that only 28 percent of the network’s consumers believed it had a political bias. Thirty-seven percent of those who saw a bias found it was toward conservatives; 56 percent of them said liberals were favored. A company spokesman told me the network received positive responses to a town hall it held on race and sports with President Barack Obama and its Michael Sam coverage, but a negative response to Jenner’s award and Schilling’s firing.

I asked McBride a final question, a version of which has been simmering in many newsrooms around the country since December: Does ESPN owe anything to its socially conservative viewers? “They might explore places where there’s common ground," she said. "They could do a better job looking for stories that don’t fall into predictable liberal clichés. But, remember, not every story has two sides."

McBride then reminded me of the Dallas Morning News. Last year, the newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton, the first time it had endorsed a Democrat in 75 years. Enraged readers protested outside the newsroom and threatened to cancel subscriptions. The New York Times experienced a similar phenomenon after new columnist Bret Stephens, a conservative, questioned climate change in his debut column.

"There’s a fundamental problem when people see our journalism as unethical because it doesn’t represent their point of view," McBride said. "I don't know if there's a good answer to that."

