The problem with anonymous sources especially in a media company as big as ESPN is you don’t know who you can believe and who you can trust. The truth usually is somewhere in the middle, but you have to dig deeper to find it.
ESPN wanted to try something new with Sportscenter, and that is how SC6 with Michael Smith and Jemele Hill was born. I truly believe if President Obama were still in office they would still be on the air, but sadly it debuted right when Donald Trump was taking office, and the country was heavily divided.
MAGA was emboldened by Trump’s victory and not in favor of a 6 pm Sportscenter that had two high profile African-American anchors who spoke a lot about social issues. ESPN since Trump has taken over has been walking a tightrope of trying to appease the MAGA based, but not being seen as Trump’s puppets (like the NFL). When you do that, no one is happy and in the end that caused the SC6 experiment to end when it became clear that Jemele Hill and Michael Smith weren’t comfortable in the direction the show was going and the ratings started to fall. In the TV world ratings matter more than anything else.
Today a story came out in the Hollywood Reporter about the some of the internal conflicts that is going on at ESPN.
As the worldwide sports leader with 87 million subscribers, ESPN presents a big and juicy target. But there also have been unforced errors. The network apologized last summer for a fantasy football marathon that for some conjured a slave auction — mere days after white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Internal discord over the 6 p.m. SportsCenter experiment co-hosted by Jemele Hill and Michael Smith — and yanked after less than a year despite four-year deals worth $10 million each — still lingers.
When Hill, who became a lightning rod with critics dubbing the show “WokeCenter,” left in February, Norby Williamson, ESPN’s executive vp and executive editor of studio production, quipped in front of a room full of people: “One down, one to go.” Four ESPN employees tell THR that Dave Roberts, ESPN’s vp content, was heard characterizing the show as “too black.” (Through a spokesperson, Roberts, who is African-American, vehemently denies saying this.)
“It’s not that they were too woke, or too black, the problem was they were too new,” says a veteran senior executive. “They were too unfamiliar to the 6 p.m. audience. From the second they started they were up against internal crap, the traditionalists shitting on them, and they faced harsh criticism externally. It was panic from moment one. And the network didn’t do a good job of defending and supporting them.”
Dave Roberts has been responsible for many African-Americans and minorities getting opportunities at ESPN, not just front facing like Stephen A. Smith and Bomani Jones, but behind the scenes as well as many producers (First Take and the new Sportscenter at 6 pm for example) are African-Americans. He was the first African-American news director in the state of Ohio and Georgia, so this doesn’t appear to be a situation where a black man had something against black people, but someone who was trying to deal with an impossible situation created by someone else. Context matters and the Hollywood Reporter didn’t frame the context of the problems with SC6 very well.
With that being said, it would be naive not to see there is a reason Sage Steele is sitting in that 6 pm seat and not Jemele Hill. Steele inclusion was a win for MAGA and appeased them enough that the ratings have increased on the 6 pm Sportscenter.
ESPN is a microcosm of our society at the moment; it is divided, that is why all these anonymous sources are happening. The ship is a little wobbly, it isn’t the Titanic, but there are leaks. When you have internal battles at the top sometimes there is collateral damage. ESPN pushed for SC6 and poured a lot of money into it, but there were obviously people who were not in favor of it.
You can’t please everyone, and by in large ESPN does a better job with diversity than any other major sports network, and they should be commended on that. How many black on-air personalities you see on FS1 that aren’t former players or EX-ESPNers?
ESPN wants to just talk about sports, but the reality is it is all intermingled now, so no matter what they do someone is going to take shots at them and in this case it came from the inside, not the outside.