“I’m watching ‘60 Minutes’ last night, with the whole Stormy Daniels thing, and the President and all that,” Stephen A. Smith said, early on a Monday near the end of March. He was sitting behind the desk in his small, sparsely furnished office at the Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters of ESPN, eating breakfast—oatmeal with brown sugar and milk, and a green smoothie. The live taping of “First Take,” the morning-time sports-debate show that he co-hosts and that has made him one of the network’s best-paid stars, would begin in a couple of hours. The night before, Daniels, a well-known performer in pornographic films, had sat across from Anderson Cooper and outlined in queasy detail the particulars of her tryst with Donald Trump, and of the hush money she subsequently received from his fixer, Michael Cohen. “And all I’m thinking about,” Smith continued, “is, Is he getting impeached? Really? Is anybody being arrested? Really?! So why are we doing this? That’s really my attitude. I’m watching, and they’re talking about”—here he affected a mocking, singsong parody of an over-earnest political pundit—“ ‘Well, the lawyer paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and basically because of that you did it on behalf of the President and it can be perceived as a campaign contribution, and you exceeded the limit.’ And I’m sitting there, like, ‘So, let me get this straight. In this day and age, somebody tried to wield influence, paid off somebody, and he’s already in office, and you think that you’re gonna get him out of there? Good luck with that.’ That’s how I deduce things.”

I got the impression that, under other circumstances, Smith would have happily continued to narrate his underwhelmed response to the blooming national scandal for the rest of breakfast. The hallmark of his presence on TV and radio—where, every weekday, beginning just an hour after “First Take” goes off air, he hosts the two-hour “Stephen A. Smith Show” —is his ability not only to talk but to editorialize, at length, and more or less extemporaneously, about any topic tossed his way, like a juggler whose every bauble is an item of current events. Already that morning, as we walked from a “First Take” production meeting to the ESPN cafeteria, and then to his office, he’d offered his thoughts on the perils of the sedentary life (“Blood clots and all of that stuff. That’s how that develops—always sitting, never stand, never walk, never run”); the hierarchy among big-screen leading men (“I happen to love Will Smith. I happen to love Ed Norton. I happen to love my brother Jamie Foxx, who I think is the most talented and versatile talent in all of Hollywood. I love these guys, but there’s only one Denzel”); and the relative benefits of various milks (“I used to think the almond milk was best, but then somebody told me—a trainer told me—there’s too much estrogen up in there. In the almond milk. That’s right.” It’s not right. “You don’t wanna walk around with man-boobs if you don’t have to. I got away from that”). Given time, he might have explicated the angles of the Stormy Daniels affair the way that he and his daily “First Take” debate partner, Max Kellerman, size up an N.F.L. coach’s press conference or the latest playoff performance by LeBron James.

But he had alighted on the tawdry intrigue of the moment only to illustrate a larger point, about how audiences these days approach news media, whether it concerns sports or politics or, as seems to be the case more and more often, both at once. “You watch to just hear perspectives,” he said. “Back in the day, you watched to learn the news. Now you can get the news in five minutes. Between your smartphones and everything else—you’ve always got the news. So you’re interested in watching different perspectives, hearing what people have to say, what their opinions are, and why. And sort of gauging whether or not they’re right or wrong. People think they know. They’re not interested in learning. They’re interested in hearing whether or not your perspective is aligned with theirs. If so, why, and if not, why not? That used to be just sports. Now it’s everywhere.

“The job,” he said, looking thrilled to have it, “is to be enough of a personality that they want to know what you think.”

Smith, who turned fifty last year, is tall and lanky, with negligible shoulders; in person, the great majority of his body seems supplementary, like the long stem of a small-bowled glass that delicately holds his head. The upper part of his back stoops slightly, pushing his face forward into the space between himself and the camera, an instrument that has never daunted him, he says, not even the very first time he appeared on air. He saw the red light and popped into action, like Jordan after the whistle. His eyes are deep-set and uncommonly circular; when he stretches them into surprise—often in accompaniment of a spiked tetrasyllable like “ri-di-cu-lous,” or “pre-pos-ter-ous,” or “Max Kel-ler-man”—they are perfect O’s. His hairline sits ever farther back from his squirming eyebrows, and his shifting expanse of forehead signals emotions before they make their way out of his mouth. It clenches into a furious rictus, or gathers itself into three befuddled folds as his brows jolt upward, or, at moments of deepest disgust, smooths out entirely, into a kind of placid pre-irritation, like a calm body of water, at the bottom of which there is a mine, ready to detonate.

All of this is secondary, though, to Smith’s voice, and its four distinct registers. There’s the even second tenor, which he uses to convey information, or to drily recapitulate somebody else’s point before chopping it down. Slightly higher, pitchwise, is the lilting whine that he deploys for derision. Above these is a falsetto, which punctuates his many raptures of disbelief: “Really?!” “WHAT ?!?!” “No!!!!! ” Finally, there is the scream. Early in his TV career, Smith got the nickname Screamin’ A. (His middle name is Anthony.) When the other voices are not enough, Smith pulls a hoarse yell from somewhere near his sternum and lathers out his judgment. But, over the years, he has discovered that this register must be held in check. “I had to learn how to pull back sometimes,” he told me.

After breakfast, I followed Smith across campus to the studio where “First Take” is recorded. ESPN has been headquartered in Bristol since its early days, in the late seventies, because its two founders lived in Connecticut and real estate was cheap there. Its first broadcast aired on September 7, 1979: an episode of its flagship news program, “SportsCenter.” With funding from Getty Oil, the fledgling network purchased the rights to various college sporting events, then the N.F.L. draft. In 1984, ABC bought Getty’s stake in ESPN, and sold twenty per cent of the company to Nabisco, which sold its shares to the Hearst Corporation; in 1996, ABC’s stake became the property of the Walt Disney Company. As ESPN has grown from a basic-cable novelty to a corporate-media behemoth, its campus has likewise expanded, if not quite kept pace—these days, it looks like a dismal liberal-arts college, sans quad. The buildings that house the network’s studios, cafeterias, and offices are squat, with red brick façades interrupted by large windows. Shuttle vans carry visitors and employees from one spot to the next.