Saturday, February 18, 2017

Sports Media Doesn't Get It

Before I go on this rant let me state for the record I did not vote for Donald Trump. Anyone who wants to accuse me of being a "Trumpkin" can suck a long brown snake out of my ass.

Yesterday of RealClearSports top two stories one was by Bryan Curtis of The Ringer titled "Sportswriting Has Become a Liberal Profession - Here's How It Happened" that "explained" that sportswriters inserting their liberal political opinions into their sports reporting is not just a good thing but a very good thing. He uses the example of Lester Rodney an avowed communist from the 1930's whose (according to Bryan Curtis) "moral clarity was keener than just about anybody's." Did I mention that Lester Rodney was an avowed communist? Communism is the most evil invention ever cooked up by the mind of man and at the same time Rodney was exhibiting this superior "moral clarity" millions of people were being exterminated in Communist Russia.

Lester Rodney might have been a useful idiot but Bryan Curtis with the hindsight of history available to him is just an idiot. (RealClearSports rightly labeled the link to the story "How Liberals Hijacked the Sportswriting Profession")

The second story was labeled by RealClearSports as "ESPN Pays for Becoming Social Justice Warrior Network". The link goes to a story about how ESPN is losing 10,000 subscribers a day from people "cutting the cord". If cable channels were to be unbundled - ESPN would completely implode. There are many, many people out there who resent being forced to pay $7 per month just to have Screaming Steven A. Smith and the WNBA jammed down their throats. I cut the cord more than 3-years ago and I don't miss ESPN one bit.

What Bryan Curtis and The Ringer doesn't understand (and ESPN for that matter) is their "we're right and you're stupid if you disagree with us" when it comes to politics attitude is not the way to win friends and influence people and certainly not the way to gain or retain customers. When I go to a sports site - I expect sports. Not a lecture on veganism or an Occupy Wall Street retrospective and especially not a fawning interview with Lena Dunham. I'm removing The Ringer from my blog list. Pretty sure I can do without Mr. Curtis and The Ringer's obsession with the TV show The Bachelor. I've also stopped following Deadspin on Twitter because only one in  five Tweets seem to be about sports these days.

History has proven communism to be a giant mistake. History will also prove that inserting your liberal politics into people's sports was a bad business decision.

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