Stephen A. Smith of ESPN has his own podcast that has nothing to do with left-leaning ESPN, so that means he doesn’t care about what his bosses say about what he says on his show. He owns the podcast, so he’s speaking only for himself, and he recently said something while promoting his podcast that had to freak out some of the snowflakes at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut.
Smith’s new podcast is called Know Mercy, and he went on Pat McAfee’s show to talk about it. When McAfee asked Smith about the wokeness and political activism that defines ESPN now and has driven millions of viewers away, Smith admitted his network resembled CNN more than it did a sports network.
Smith praised the new boss Jimmy Pitaro for bringing back an ounce of sanity and telling his staff that the around-the-clock support of the progressive Democratic Party had to stop.
“I stood up and supported him for that, and I still do because we did get to a point over the years at ESPN where it was too much politics. It was the politicization of too many different things, and the sports fan got to a point where they were sending a message that they didn’t feel like their needs were being met.”
The reality is that ESPN is still more political than it should be or used to be when it was a popular sports network known as the “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” There’s almost no chance that will entirely change even with Bob Iger back as the CEO of Disney because ESPN was at its cringey worse when Iger was running the show.
But at least Smith is self-aware enough to recognize it.
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