The Press Box - 'The Press Box'—Jemele Hill and how politicization affects ESPN (Ep. 351)

Episode Date: September 14, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and Sean Fennessey discuss Jemele Hill, starting with her rise at ESPN (5:00), her upbringing in Detroit (15:00), the Trump administration's response to Hill's tweets (18:00), the impact of politicization on ESPN (26:00), and Hill's next move (32:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Wanted to tell you about House of Carbs. Hosted by one of my best friends, Joe House. I've known him since 1988. And the entire time I've known him, he's been very, very hungry. And now he is a chance to host a podcast about being hungry. All the things that make him hungry,

the food that he loves, it is a podcast by the hungry for the hungry. And it's not your typical foofy food podcast where they're talking about foie gras and all that stuff. No, no. We're talking about diners. We're talking about fried chicken sandwiches, pizza slices, best Chinese food. Everything you talk about with food is on this podcast.

And with great guests like David Chang, Chris Bianco, Jimmy Kimmel, a bunch of people coming up, all of them love food. Nobody loves food quite as much as Joe House. But listen, check this out. Subscribe right now to have some carbs wherever you get your podcast. I'm Brian Curtis. This is the press box, your favorite irregularly produced Ringer podcast. And we're here today with an unusual one because I wrote a story yesterday about Jamel Hill.

And then Jamel Hill became a story, thanks in part to the Trump White House, MAGA, Twitter, and other elements. And we wanted to talk about it more. And so to avoid a spalding gray situation of me talking to the microphone, the ringer's editor and my editor, Sean Fennacy, is here. Brian. How are you, Sean? I wish you would do a Spalding Gray. That would be wonderful. It's too bad.

But I'm glad to be here and I'm glad because I want people to hear about the story that you wrote. And also, I think just having a conversation about what's happening inside of ESPN and maybe what's happening inside the press room at the White House is relevant to the world right now. And how they have somehow come together. It's an incredible moment in politics, sports, and media. Yes. And that is sort of your wheelhouse. So what a time for Brian Curtis. What a time for the press box.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. So let's do a little TikTok to open this show. I assume most people listening right now are aware of what's happened, but let's do it anyway. On September 11th, Jamel Hill tweets a response to someone who has tweeted at her and identifies the President Donald Trump as a white supremacist. And a bigot and other things, yep. And so when this happens, what was the response to that initially?

Were you aware of this when it first happened? I think it was in the afternoon on September 11th. Barely. Yeah. It seemed like a non-thing. In the media atmosphere, it's not uncommon for people that are popular on Twitter to call the president a racist, right? In the liberal Twitter sphere that we are both members.

of, to some extent. That is basically the most normal sentiment you could read right now. Exactly. And so before we go any further, let us both disclose. We once worked for ESPN as editors and writers at Grandland. Having said that, ESPN made a choice to respond to Jamel's tweet. And in doing so, I think essentially kicked up a storm. Fair to say? I think so. They did not suspend Jamel. The plan all along was for her to be on television the next day, which in fact was. They called the language. I think it was inappropriate was the term that they used. But again, and we'll talk about this a little bit more later, within, I think, the sort of spectrum of ESPN responses to controversy. It was pretty light.

Yes. It was a single statement shared on their PR platform, essentially. The comments on Twitter from Jamel Hill regarding the president do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jamel, and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate, as you said. No, this was also not received well, especially on liberal Twitter. And then what happens? So then a reporter goes to the White House press conference and asks Sarah Huckabee Sanders, reads some of the things to Mel said, excuse me, tweeted, and says, do you have any response to this? And Sarah Huckabee Sanders says this is a fireable offense, quote unquote. Imagine that.

Imagine that. Seeming to suggest that the Trump administration is recommending that ESPN. fire a prominent personality. And the Trump is trying in some way to pick who ESPN puts on the air, which kicks this up to another level. It is national news now. It is now national news, yes. And so yesterday we spent the day hand-wringing our way through whether the president should even be thinking about someone of Jamel Hill standing. On the ringer side, earlier that morning before Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke on the issue, you published a feature that you'd been working on about Jamel. Let's talk a little bit about that story and what the person that you found when you visited

Bristol, Connecticut in June, and, you know, how this story now fits so neatly and coincidentally into the narrative. Well, I think I sent you an email back in April. This is in the shadow of the ESPN layoffs. Daniel Roberts of Yahoo had written this piece, a general piece about ESPN, and found that like half of the 3,000 comments below this piece, which is about layoffs and ESPN and navigating through this new media world, we're about Michael and Jamel, who were not the subject of the piece. And we've all seen, I think, directly or indirectly, them getting lots and lots of crap on Twitter, racist crap and other crap. And so I sent you a note and said, we should do Jamel. We should do a profile of Jamel Hill. She's one of the most interesting people in media right now.

And she has weirdly become the focus of all this ESPN hate that's out in the world. And so Michael and Jamel notably in January took over, what did you? has been redubbed the 6, which is the 6 p.m. Sports Center, which is a very prominent position for years before that. They had been hosts, personalities, and writers on ESPN platforms. Tell a little bit about sort of their transition and also how they represent a wider, I think you call them people movers at ESPN, because they've both had very similar and interesting paths in media. Yeah, Michael came up through the Boston Globe. He was originally hired at ESPN as an insider. And then he essentially, he told me this, this wasn't in the piece, was made redundant by the hire of Adam Schaefter.

So he comes into break football news for ESPN. And all of a sudden, ESPN says, never mind, we got the King Insider here. We need to figure out something else for you to do. So he's in this period of wandering. Jamel Hill was brought in to replace Skip Bayless on page two of ESPN. Skip now having become a TV star by this point. She starts doing, she had an early contract where she had something for like 20 TV hits in her contract. She exceeded those immediately on places like Around the Horn and the sports reporters and cold pizza back in the day.

And so all of a sudden, she's a TV person. And they go on this kind of long quest where they know they want to be on TV. But ESPN doesn't want to put them on TV at least in a permanent position or in a position that they'd like. They eventually land on this show called His and Hers, which is on ESPN 2, which they do pretty much whatever they want. Big parodies, talk pop culture, talk social issues. don't really pay a ton of attention to the news of the day unless they want to. It's all about their relationship. And then as ESPN begins to do things, they say, well, we have a problem at 6 o'clock,

which is we have the Sports Center. Highlights are degrading. The 6 o'clock Sports Center never had much news anyway because it was in the weird part of the middle of the day. How are we going to fix this? I know, let's go to Michael and Jamel and let's make them the hosts. And that's sort of where we picked up this story. At that point, they started the day after the Super Bowl, so they're probably three or four months into remaking SportsCenter. And you really go inside the production of an episode of the six in the story, which I encourage people to read.

But let's talk a little bit about what you saw, how they make a show like that and how their personalities really come out aggressively in that format. The first thing that was a huge surprise was that it's all about social media. ESPN at this point in history is basically being produced by Twitter, which as people who work at a website, our website is often produced by Twitter. True story. Oh, man, did you see that funny thing today? Can we write something about it? Can we make a joke about it?

And it wasn't until I was actually standing in Bristol. And not only was in the meetings for the 6th, I would look up at the TV, and the video of Clay Thompson dancing in a Chinese nightclub was not only part of the 6, it was the lead story on Rachel Nichols, The Jump. And then I would see, like, I'd look up and see Pablo Torre dressed as evil-coneval on Sports Nation,

you know, talking about videos on Twitter. And it was that ESPN has kind of become this giant Twitter feed with all these different, funny, unique personalities in a way. So that was the first big surprise. The second was just watching the two of them try to figure out 6 p.m. Scott Van Pelt told me in the story, at midnight at his sports center, I have highlights. They have topics. So if there's a woge bomb, that's great because they can say, Kyrie Irving, what's going on? Let's debate.

Where should he go? Who won the trade? But otherwise, you're kind of trying to figure out what do people want at 6 o'clock. How responsive should we make that to the game that ESPN is showing at 7 o'clock? Should we preview the games? Do people even come home from work and watch SportsCenter anymore? Are they at the gym? Who is consuming this?

I think of all the sports centers, probably 6 p.m. is the trickiest to figure out in this new media world. Like, who's watching? Yeah, it has been obviated for a lot of people, I think. But then there is obviously also a vocal contingent of people who still use it as part of their daily media diet. A lot of those people, probably a little bit older, possibly white, and they seem to have a negative reaction to the way that they're doing the show. But I'm curious, from seeing it on the inside, did you sense a creative anguish of any kind with watching them try to put it together, or did they feel comfortable making the show every day?

No, they were totally upfront about creative anguish. I never heard either of them crow about how good they thought the show was. I heard them talk at length about how they were trying to figure out what the show was. And at that point, They would sit there and say, well, what do we lead with? Do we lead with something funny? Do we lead with topic A? Do we lead with what game ESPN is showing at 7 o'clock? That night, I remember that one of their producers told me he didn't even know what was on at 7 o'clock.

That night, it turned out was a baseball game. It probably would have been a good thing to know. But it was all creative anguish. And it was also how much are we supposed to debate each other? Because that's clearly what ESPN is paying them to do. And how much is Jamel or Michael supposed to hold a piece of paper and say, this just in, the Washington Post reports, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, on the Redskins logo or something.

It's all creative anguish. We've sensed that strategy work really well before, obviously, you know, Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, longtime friends and colleagues, but also willing to sort of put on the persona of disagreement in an effort to make a great show. And PTI has been a huge success for ESPN for decades now. Do Michael and Jamel similarly have to create oppositional forces to make a good show? They don't have to. They're such good friends.

They met, and this is in the story, too. They were actually kind of set up on kind of a pseudo date back in 2002. They became really good friends when they both joined ESPN a couple of years later. They're really good. When they're at their best, they can take a conversation and make it personal. So, you know, it's like Russell Westbrook, how did he find out Kevin Durant was leaving? So then the conversation they have is Jamel says, now if I ever left the show, how would I tell you? Would I make sure you found out personally by a text?

Would I sit down with you? Would you find out on Twitter? And Michael says, I wouldn't approach it that way. I would do this. So it's not the kind of bogus fake argument we see on so much of sports TV. It feels like you and I sitting at a bar if we really knew each other really well and having this organic conversation come out of it. That's when they're at their best. Right.

Nothing like this podcast, which is completely rehearsed and false. But, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You can sense that too, and I suspect that that's a big part of their success is that there, is, for lack of a better word, in authenticity to what's happening between them. I wonder, though, why you think people have had such a negative response. There are probably some obvious reasons and then maybe some subtextual reasons. That was also at the top of their mind when I talked to him. And Michael, you know, I quote him in the piece and he actually said this about four different ways and said, let's just talk about why people don't like us and then began to list the things.

Clearly, a lot of people on Twitter, as we saw some of the responses to Jamel yesterday, don't like them because they're black. Some of the people on... Twitter don't like them because they once in a while talk about social issues. They're both people that are really interested in that. It doesn't actually show up on the six very much at all. Some people don't like what they've quote-unquote done to SportsCenter. I think there's a whole spectrum of reasons. And by the way, I would, you know, let's say that those are pretty close to the top for some

of the craziest Twitter reaction. If you get down to like number 100 on the list, I would say that making ESPN about Twitter and about social media does have a certain alienating effect on the audience. I mean, I think of like my uncles who were in their 60s, big sports fans, aren't on Twitter. They turn on a lot of ESPN, and it's like, this is a digest of a world I don't live in. That's right. And I don't understand this. You know, I just literally don't understand what they're quoting and talking about.

It seems like in recent times at ESPN, there has been a marked attempt to reach a more diverse audience, It's a very forward-facing approach, the launch of the undefeated over a period of time, the ascension of a series of on-air personalities. And, you know, it's pointed, if not spoken. And the resistance that it has received has been notable and concurrent with the ESPN layoffs that have been happening over periods of time, most recently, I think, in the spring earlier this year, which you wrote about. How correlative are these things? Do you think it's just sort of the rise of the shit posting Trump supporter or is there some actuality in the decline of the network relative to what they've done here? I think it's a whole bunch of things coming together.

I think Trump is certainly in the background, if not the foreground of all of it. But yeah, the layoffs, we've just – there are a lot of reasons right now in the world for people not to like ESPN. And I think they all kind of come together in certain points and become one thing. The layoffs were big because, as people pointed out, they didn't go and say, we're going to lay off the worst people we have at the network. They laid off people for a variety of reasons. But then this kind of poisonous idea was introduced that somehow the people who were still at ESPN were inherently unworthy of being there,

aka Michael and Jamel in a lot of people's mouth. Oh, what are they? They must, you know, what are they doing there? Let's come up with a sinister reason they didn't get laid off. And I think it all kind of comes together. That is both political and it's about ESPN having kind of a reduced place in the media world. and it's just kind of random anger. So I think probably a lot of those things are being mixed together.

So you mentioned that Michael in particular is aware of the fact that they're not liked. Do you think that that is affecting the kinds of show that they're making every day? It's certainly in their heads. I think they're both very good at when they get before a camera and think about what they want to do. They're both pretty good about tuning it out. I think it's back there somewhere. And when we say not liked, we're talking about a very noisy, small segment of social media. When they go to the NBA finals, they are loved.

You know, when they go out on remotes or go to the fight in Vegas like they did a couple weeks ago, in fact, Jamel told me I didn't put the – find a room for this in the piece, but they like to joke when they go to an event like that. See, white people do like us because people are always coming up asking for selfies and stuff like that. But in the world we live in, social media weirdly becomes the dominant voice. Yeah. And, you know, I don't think it's possible. I led with this, you know, this scene where they make a really funny joke, you know, venturing out a little bit on the diving board there in the room when they're kind of, you know, going through the show that didn't appear on the air.

And I can't help but think that that's in their heads somewhere as they're going through all this. Let's talk a little bit more about Jamel specifically because you spend a lot of time with Hart. and she's a fascinating person, really thoughtful. And, you know, I think simultaneously very known because she's been a writer and a very outspoken person for a long period of time, but she also has a fascinating life story. Who did you find when you went and spent time with her? She's, I thought that people didn't really know who she was at all. And one of the reasons I wanted to do the story is who was Jamel Hill. It's just the most elemental reason to do her profile.

She's from Detroit. She grew up with her mom only. They were very close to the poverty line or on welfare for most, I would say, large parts of her childhood. Her mom, as she told me, was sexually assaulted at one point when Jamel was very young and then entered this just horrible spiral where she couldn't be in rooms with the lights off and told me she still today does not like to be in the dark anywhere. She began using opioids, which is now a big thing in America and of our big concern, I should say, in America. But back then, there weren't many resources to deal with that. And she would take Jamel around Detroit to buy drugs and score. And Jamel watched all this.

One of the funny things is when I was talking to her mom, I would kind of tell her mom, the story that Jamel told me, and her mom, Denise, would say, I can't believe Jamel remembered all that because she just didn't realize what Jamel as a child was soaking up. She just didn't realize it. And, you know, Jamel at one point got a television from her mom for, or from her grandmother, excuse me, for a birthday. Her mom stole it or took it and pawned it and bought more drugs, which eventually led Jamel to leave the house altogether.

So this is somebody who has a very, very, very difficult background. Jamel is very, she's a person who uses the phrase a lot. Everything happens for a reason. She looks back at that with a lot of bitterness. She sort of thinks that this stuff happened and it made me into the person I am today. And so that's okay. She didn't love it. I think she didn't realize at the time how hard it was, perhaps.

But then she gets to become a columnist. And one of the most interesting things for her, especially now that she's part of quote unquote liberal ESPN in the eyes of all these critics, she was politically all over the place as a columnist. And Michigan State, she offended every single student group, including the black student groups. And we had Kelly Carter, her friend who writes the undefeated, told me, I lost a lot of my black cred by being best friends with Jamel. And people would come up to and say, has this woman Jamel ever met Jesus? That was what they would say to her because she would pissing so many people off. I read in Orlando Sentinel column. She wrote when Barry Bond said when he was being killed for PED, said, I'm a victim of racism.

And Jamel would write a column, no, you're not. People are mad at you because of PEDs. They're not mad at you because you're black. We mentioned the Lovar Ball example. She defended LeVar Ball for what he said to Christine Leahy. She is not somebody who I would call a practitioner of a particular political line. Sometimes I think frustratingly so, maybe, with her columns. Like, wait, what does she think about this?

What's undergirding that? Is it, I go with my gut? This is what I feel is the right thing. And that's why I'm clarifying these opinions? An absolute self-confidence in her ability to look at something and come up with the answer. And how does that manifest as a television personality? She slings. she slings opinions and she knows what she thinks.

I think she comes off on TV as very contemplative a lot of the time. One of the most striking things about her on television and in person. She doesn't sound slick. I mean, I think I talk to sports TV people is, what, 80% of my work diet. You are the major domo. And a lot of times I feel like they are on a TV screen talking to me when we're doing the interview, going through all this. They're literally talking to me like a viewer at home.

Chappelle never sounds like that. She doesn't sound like that on TV. She doesn't sound polished, I would say, and I use that word with big air quotes, on television in a good way. She sounds like somebody having a natural conversation rather than somebody you put a token into and they just start blurting out sports opinions. But beneath that is this absolute confidence in what she says and what she thinks. Do you think that this moment that she's having right now will somehow change her broadcasting personality or even necessarily the identity of the six? It's hard to say. I sort of doubt it. She's somebody who's just been under a lot of pressure and criticism ever since she's been a writer because of the way she writes and because of the stance she takes. By the way, I should mention this. When she was at the Orlando Sentinel, the AP did a survey of all the newspapers in America, they found that she was probably, can't do a complete survey, but we found she was probably the only black female sports columns in America, the only one at the time. Just think about that.

And if you think about the stuff that came into her email box back then, the phone call she got, some of the comments she received, this is another level, of course, but she's used to it. She gets it. Any sense of how she's handling the Sarah Huckabee-Sandrews moment? I texted with her a little bit this morning. She sounded like Jamel on text. I think it's pretty funny that Jamel went to the White House Media Party last year with Barack Obama to Barack. Obama is a big fan of hers. And now she is being denounced from the same White House. So, you know, we have traveled full circle. Are there other examples of the Office of the President having knowledge of sports broadcasters like this? I mean, setting aside maybe Bill Simmons is hosting Barack Obama. I was going to say Obama knew them well. I mean, I'm not sure that it – we're not sure

that Trump knows who she is. And I'm not sure that – I think they love to pounce on easy bait. And by the way, they changed the whole dynamic of this thing. There was a lot of pressure yesterday morning on ESPN to do something, whether it was apologized. And by the way, the statement you read was people characterized that as an apology. That was not an apology. I don't see the word apologize in there anywhere to do something because it was, how dare this ESPN host insult the president like this? Well, as soon as the White House weighed in, the power dynamic shifted. Because now it becomes, whether you agree with Jamel or you don't, the White House is trying to dictate what journalists say. And Trump does this a lot. He takes a winning

hand and throws it away. And so now, you know, I saw people even say, I disagree with everything about Jamel Hill's politics, but I absolutely don't think the right, the Trump has any right to tell her what to do. It didn't take long for people to dig up some old Trump tweets from 2014 and identify that he had been calling Barack Obama a racist while he was, in fact, a television personality. Well, he was a TV star. So it's quite a thing that happens. There's a tweet for everything when it comes to our president.

Absolutely. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about Jamel's response and ESPN's second response. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I wanted to tell you about Black on the air, hosted by the one and only, the great one, Larry Wilmore, even though he's a Lakers fan, I still like him and he's talented. But he has all kinds of guests on from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Al Franken to Bernie Sanders. You name it.

They're coming on. Pop Culture, Politics, Newsmakers. And then at the beginning of every podcast, Larry does a little riff about whatever is either sticking in his car or things that he's enjoying. Although he has been enjoying much lately the way the world's going. But Larry will riff on anything. And then he has guests on. It's great. If you liked everything else that he's done, comedy-wise, if you love this Comedy Central show,

You will love this podcast. It is a medium that he was built for. It's called Black on the Air, hosted by Larry Wilmore. Get it wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. So, you know, yesterday after the press conference at the White House, Jamel issued a statement and also ESPN issued a statement. Just from my advantage point, I thought the second ESPN statement was unnecessary and a little bit strange. I'll read it really quickly here.

Jamel has a right to her personal opinions, but not to publicly share them on a platform that implies that she was in any way speaking on behalf of ESPN. She has acknowledged that her tweets crossed that line and has apologized for doing so. We accept her apology. There is something, I think, a bit paternalistic about that statement. And also it leads to a broader conversation about what ESPN is now and how they can manage a conversation in this way. I mentioned some of the other shows that have launched recently. Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre will have a television show.

on that show, I suspect they're going to share some opinions that people are not going to agree with. So how do we demarcate what is in bounds and out of bounds here? A couple of thoughts about this. One is that media Twitter is very different than it was even five years ago. Look at the way New York Times reporters tweet now about Trump, about their own subjects, the way they're kind of in the fray in a way that I think would have been a fireable offense at the New York Times 10 years ago. So that's really changed. And then number two is just, you know, ESS.

SPN has changed in a way that they've embraced debate culture, we said 100 times. Well, when you tell somebody, we're hiring you because you give us your great, filtered, fearless opinions. But by the way, you're not allowed to have an unfiltered, fearless opinion about the number one news story in the world. And a guy who is tromping all over sports whenever he decides he wants to. You either have to not have an opinion or you have to pull a punch. That doesn't make any sense at some point. you just, it's just untenable. I mean, I think we probably deal with it in a very small way at the ringer.

You know, how do you tell somebody like, we love your literary voice, we want you to write for us? Oh, don't ever tweet about it. It just, it wouldn't work. We had to throw that towel in, I think, on November 9th. Yeah, I think so, if not before, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think those two things are really a problem here. And I think what ESPN is thinking is we're going to have anchors who sort of talk like they would have on a tweet like they would have 10 years ago.

I just don't believe that's tenable anymore. I believe the horse is out of the barn. I also believe it's different when you have a president who is being more outrageous than Jamel Hill on Twitter every day. You're never going to be more outrageous than Donald Trump is. So I just find that all funny. And you know what? With ESPN, I think a lot of people were really mad at what they said. We weren't for a guy who got suspended for talking about Roger Goodell.

So I actually took a slightly more sympathetic view to ESPN's responses. And I know that, again, making Jamel apologize. all that stuff is, I don't personally support that. But when I read what they said, I thought, this is pro forma. This is them dotting eyes and crossing T's, but not actually doing anything about it. Jamel's going to be on the air the next day, and off we go, and she'll talk about Trump again, and she'll tweet about Trump again, maybe not in quite the same way. I sense a little bit of irony, though, in the fact that the richest topic for anybody to be talking about on first take or anywhere else would be this issue. And I'm sure that they are, in fact,

avoiding it today, though I have not tuned in. Oh, yeah. They've got the biggest media story in the world. And if this were MSNBC, they'd have Katie Tour on a set today talking about it. Absolutely. What it's like to be demonized from the podium by Donald Trump. Megan Kelly would be talking on Fox about Donald Trump, right? To cite some other coincidentally female anchors that Trump, his administration, has gone after. Do you think that there's any value left to that sort of illusory wall between the two things? I mean, we heard it plenty, I think, from readers of our site and listeners of our podcast.

Still do. When we dive into this stuff, there are plenty of people who are just like, get this out of my face. I come here to be not a part of this. I'm trying to get away from the loudness of the political conversation. Can you see a world in which ESPN leans more aggressively into these conversations? The hardest question to answer right now is, is part of your audience going to exit if you do lean into these conversations? I tend to think that because of the way ESPN is structured, the only answer is more political. speech. It shouldn't just be Jamel Hill. It should also be other people. Will Kane can do his

thing on Twitter. You're going to have limits, of course. I think Kurt Schilling probably define what those limits are. You should talk about that, though, a little bit. There is a secondary history of some conservative voices inside the network, and there have been some consequences there as well. Yeah, and I think what was reading yesterday, refreshing my memory, was that Kurt Schilling actually did it three times before he was suspended. He had some kind of social media post where he said I wanted Hillary to be buried under a jail. I mean, we're now sort of progressing beyond a political critique of somebody and into, like, I want something. Attack of a visible.

Yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, I think there, if you can find all kinds of double standards, which is why I think, and it's so hard to police, which is why I think the answer is probably slightly more political speech. I know for a fact that Jamel and Michael don't want to do a political show at 6 o'clock. They would rather not, they would rather not, there's plenty of sports stuff they can talk about. They don't actually care. They don't want to make it MSNBC. That's actually, I think, one of the false ideas out here. They happily will have a show that's 95% about politics, and then they can do an anchorman parody.

And then Colin Kaepernick comes up, and they're going to, of course, going to talk about that like we all do. But I don't, they don't want a political show. And they certainly don't want to be political. I mean, well, man, I don't know if they don't want to. to. Maybe that's wrong. I'm not sure they wanted to be political figures at this level where they're being denounced by Trump's administration. In your analysis of sports media history, can you think of a time in which the politicization and also the demand upon people's opinions has ever been more aggressive or more in demand?

Not quite like this, but because of my age, you know, and we missed the 70s. Yeah, I'm curious if 1968 was anything like what we're having right now. I think so. I mean, I think in terms of crossing the streams, it certainly was. I still think this is an echo. This is the kind of, this is still, until we get, you know, really into find our Mohammed Ali's and people like this, this will still be the kind of middling reboot of the 60s. It's not the 60s. It's not the 70s. But the streams are crossing the same way. The pressure is there the same way. I'd also say this about ESPN. ESPN has tons of good journalists as you and I know that, We'll happily take a call from an irate owner or an angry player about something they put on the air or wrote for the website. They take fire every day.

Right. That is a different kind of fire than the kind that Dean Bacay and Marty Barron are used to taking from the White House. And that's a different kind of pressure. I'm not saying they're not up to it. But now it's a different ballgame when you're now squaring off of the White House. Guys in New York Times and Washington Post live for that stuff. That is the way they are trained as journalists to dig in. And if they can get the White House, they're going to go get them, get some news.

I think this is new ground for ESPN. And I'm not sure they want to be dug into this fight. I saw it on Brian Stelter's newsletter, Trump versus ESPN. I mean, that's a tough place for them. And I think it's going to be fascinating to watch how they try to handle that and grapple with that idea. I genuinely don't know what direction they'll take. But what direction you think will Jamel take? Where will her career be a couple of years from now?

She told me when she was in one of her lower periods at ESPN, which she couldn't get a show, she thought she might go to cable news, that at cable news, of course, would reward her for talking about politics and social issues. She would want her to talk about that stuff, would not care as it doesn't care when Van Jones or a lot of lesser examples go off on different riffs. I could still see that. A lot of Jamel's friends still think she's going to wind up there one day. which is not to say that day will be tomorrow or next year or the year after that. I think she's probably going to do SportsCenter for the time being. I could totally see that.

I think what Trump has accidentally done is really empowered her, like he did with, we mentioned Megan Kelly, K. Peter and people like that because all of a sudden, it seems like she bothers the White House in some way. That's right. He has become a kingmaker of his enemies in a way, right? Oh, absolutely. And what is more empowering for a journalist when people empower are bothered by you? So I think he's given her a great, or Sarah Huckabee Sanders on his behalf, has given her a great gift.

And now she's kind of got to decide what to do with it. And what does she want to do? She'd want to write a book. Does she want to use all this sort of capital on air and reorient the show a little bit? Make it a little grapple with some of these things a little bit more frequently? I don't know. She could do all kinds of things. One thing I'm always curious about when you and I are working on a story or if there's a media,

narrative unraveling is what the lifespan of this thing is and when this will seem like old news. Yeah. How long do you think this is going to run for? Is it over already? Clay Travis and those guys having stoked the ESPN as liberal thing gives this some legs because it's actually part of a larger thing. It's not just a one-off. The Jamel Trump thing I think will probably blow over pretty quickly if it hasn't by the end

of today the next couple of days, especially since Jamel doesn't seem to be. to be addressing it head-on, on air, as we said, like maybe a cable news network would and kind of use it, right? It's just not ESPN's way to do that. But I think now that we're in this strange world of every gesture ESPN does is being scrutinized for political bias, that will continue to happen. Certainly, Jamel will be more scrutinized than ever before. All of ESPN's personalities will be. So I don't think we're at the end of this particular weird period where ESPN is somehow like CBS or CBS. CNN or the New York Times, the failing ESPN, as Trump might put it, I think we're just beginning.

And I think that's going to last for the foreseeable future. Let's close with this. Talk a little bit about your favorite phraseology on a question. Talk a little bit about the cottage industry of all right sports media commentary. Because I think that a lot of people who follow this closely believe that much of this conversation was driven, in fact, and a lot of ESPN's response was driven, in fact, by a few loud voices coming from a more conservative background or presenting as a conservative background, and their response to the way that ESPN has changed over the years. Do you think that that's accurate?

And what do you make of the rise of a couple of those voices? Yeah, I think they are the drivers of it. But then it nicely gets picked up by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. We've all seen that hilarious screencap of Hannity's monochrome conversation yesterday about, about the Jamel Hill crisis, whatever we're calling it these days, because it nicely goes up and down the right-wing media food chain. It works for Brightbarred Sports. It works for their various people that find media bias arms, which deal with a lot of political media. And then it works on Hannity and Fox because it's left-wing outrage, right? Or quote-unquote outrage,

I should say. That's the way it feeds it. I think when I talk to people at ESPN, their The biggest puzzle is how to respond to it. As the worldwide leader, your first instinct is, let's not do it because we just empower these people if we respond to everything. But then it reaches, I think, a critical mass where you just like you have to do something. You have to say something. You can't let – maybe you can't respond to everything. But if you don't do anything, then it just becomes there's a lot of people in the world

and we've seen in the last election that you can just repeat something over and over again, a sizable number of people will believe it. And that's what they're struggling with right now. How do we deal with this? What do we say? Do we assure people that we don't have a political bias? Or do we just say something like, some of our people are here, are liberal. Some of them tend to be conservative. They say whatever they want. And we just look for interesting people to put on the air. I don't know. But that's the puzzle PR-wise they've got to solve now. And that's what makes those statements so anguish. I would also say this. I think the way Clay Travis and those guys draw blood is not just by saying ESPN is liberal, by saying ESPN is political.

Because when you affect a gloss of nonpartisanship of being above the fray, then everything becomes, aha, gotcha. Look at that. Look at that. So the quote unquote hypocrisy that they think that they say they're exposing is not ESPN's liberal agenda. It's just that ESPN has a politics, right? As ESPN insists over and over again that it doesn't have a politics. As every media organization does in a way as well. And this is just what all kinds of media, old media orgs have dealt with us in the past. But that's ESPN's challenge right now. Brian, this is your show and not mine. You should take us out. Oh, my gosh. I feel this is my Spalding great chance to end up.

Sean, thanks for joining me. Thank you for interviewing me today on my own show. The pleasure was all mine. It's amazing. I feel this story will continue, and I feel we will have much more to say on. on the whole puzzle of ESPN circa 2017. Just one more beat in a beautiful pop song. Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Thank you.