Part 1: ESPN, Liberals, Conservatives and the Jackie Robinson Erasure

Why the millennial sports scolds annoy even when they're right

Perhaps you didn’t hear, but there was a sports/politics blowup this week about a brief Jackie Robinson Department of Defense website purge that was widely discussed on ESPN.

Quoting an article from ESPN baseball newsbreaker Jeff Passan:

The Department of Defense restored a story on its website highlighting Jackie Robinson's military service Wednesday after deleting it as part of President Donald Trump's efforts to purge references to diversity, equity and inclusion through a "digital content refresh."

While it does not make any references to DEI, the story on Robinson was among a swath scrubbed from government websites in recent days. Before the story on Robinson's service was restored, the URL had redirected to one that added the letters "dei" in front of "sports-heroes."

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is anti DEI and this mandate apparently extends to governmental website content. There was a Pentagon memo on February 26 that directed a digital refresh for "all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)," and Robinson’s page appeared to get caught up in that dragnet. Jeff Passan admonished:

The ghouls who did this should be ashamed.

I’m not certain about how the process of excising Robinson went. Perhaps it happened due to algorithm or individual human error, but the result clearly wasn’t a benefit to the U.S. fighting forces.

The Robinson scrape itself made for bad press, made even worse by the DOD PR official who explained the momentary Robinson erasure and other deletions like so:

Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others — we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like every other American who has worn the uniform.

This statement extended the mess because, of course, it’s impossible to discuss Jackie Robinson’s legacy divorced from the topic of race. Even if I dislike the Great Awokening era obsession with reducing people down to census category, it’s just a really stupid statement by the PR official in this particular context.

ESPN NFL analyst Mina Kimes made that point on soon to be cancelled Around the Horn, drawing annoyance from aspects of the online right. Kimes said:

He did indeed serve in the military, where he was arrested, court martialed and acquitted for refusing to move to the back of the bus. That matters. That history cannot be erased. It cannot be undone. It must be recognized to fully understand and celebrate his legacy.

I will get to criticizing my fellow millennial sports personalities for how they tend to approach politics, but first let me say: Every word of Kimes’ monologue happens to be true. In my Discourse Utopia, anyone going after Kimes here would at least acknowledge this part at the outset. Of course, this didn’t happen, as far as I could see.

That said…I understand and empathize with aspects of the general annoyance on the right in response to lectures like this. They’ve had about a decade or so of near hegemonic partisan scolding from front facing sports talent who came of age under Obama and found their voice through Twitter. There was never a day when you tuned into ESPN and saw a bunch of sports personalities jumping on the Obama or Biden administration over some embarrassing screwup. When, for a random example, UCONN center Donovan Clingan spoke freely in April of 2024 about just how dementia addled Joe Biden was in person at the White House ceremony for his team…ya, we don’t talk about that story, now do we? Obviously I could bring up the Biden admin and its 20/80 males in women’s sports issue here, but that’s a beaten dead horse at HoS.

This website incident happens, though, and it’s media tour fodder. It’s not that Kimes, Passan and a host of other finger wagging sports pundits are wrong for harping on the current admin over this idiotic handling of Robinson. It’s just that the established figures at mainstream sports publications tend to speak out in only one direction, and loudly. This is especially true of my fellow millennial cohort who flooded sports blogging/podcasting/TV in the Twitter era. I’m making a slight exception for Gen Xer Stephen A. Smith here, who also did a monologue attacking the Trump administration over Jackie Robinson and the issue of DEI. The irony of the SAS experience is that the guy angling to be the literal Democratic nominee for president is the rare ESPN personality who’ll actually criticize the Democratic Party.

One can argue that this imbalance just exists because Trump is so bad, but…can our blue-coded sports pundits face a little reality here? This is the worst stretch for the Democratic Party of my lifetime, by far. The president of the United States was clearly senile for years. If you’re a sports talker who frequently moralizes about politics and, for over a decade, you never openly uttered a critical word about this collapsing party before 2024…can you understand why people might see your public politics as highly biased to the point of just being thin propaganda? To be clear, I’m not talking about lefty peers who’ve made criticisms of their own side. I’m making a distinction between On Script vs. Off Script.

Here’s one broader aspect that’s a little complicated, before we get into the Robinson discourse in a Part 2, which is arguably a lot complicated. I’m not sure if the main cultural gripe fans have with ESPN is “Stick to sports!” or “Too left wing.” What’s confusing here is that there’s a cohort of fans who actually mean it when insisting that sports talkers should stick to sports. Many of my former colleagues simply disbelieve in the existence of such fans, but I swear they are real, and I’ve met them. Many people, including some Democrats, don’t want game commentary to become an infomercial for ideological perspectives. I’ve called this the sardine in the vending machine problem. If I press E3 for a chocolate bar, I’m thrown off when a sardine plops out, even if I like sardines.

But, obviously, a lot of people yell, “Stick to sports!” merely because they find liberal sports pontificators to be highly annoying. They’re essentially saying, “Shut up!” because they dislike what’s being said. There’s a large cohort saying “Stick to sports!” who’d actually quite love it if the personalities on ESPN started espousing conservative positions.

Are those people hypocrites? Probably, maybe, depending on how they framed their argument. I personally would favor a bit more balance versus a strict “stick to sports” mandate in commentary because sports happens to occasionally intersect with the day’s issues. That’s my taste though and the devil is in the details.

I think it’s reasonable to want more balance from media companies that are theoretically non partisan. It would be especially understandable to want that in sports media, which caters to Republican leaning customers. I guess it’s theoretically possible that ESPN’s audience (currently 74.5 percent male for online content, 71 percent White for TV content) leans Democrat, but I sort of doubt it based on demographic cues and common sense. And yet, before Elon bought Twitter, we’ve had this status quo of mainstream sports pundits using their platforms to express a near lockstep Blue conformity that was mostly out of alignment with the political views of sports fans. This market inefficiency gave rise to Clay Travis and Outkick, whatever you think of them.

So yes, in my Discourse Utopia, Around the Horn or whatever follows it would include sports analysts expressing different political perspectives, arguing topics in good faith. But that’s not happening, for a variety of reasons. One main reason is liberal disgust with conservatives to the point where it would be hard for everyone at a company to remain friends after heated discussions.

Yes, I know, conservatives are disgusted by liberals too, but there’s a raft of social science demonstrating that liberals are far more likely to end friendships over political disagreement. Another writer once explained this difference like so: Conservatives think liberals are stupid and liberals think conservatives are evil. A conservative sees a liberal’s societal improvement plan as destructively impractical, and a liberal sees the conservative’s opposition as rooted in hating the beneficiaries. I’m generalizing of course.

This rift explains a lot of modern discourse, though. It’s why it’s so difficult to convince a lot of my fellow millennial media types that perhaps they should be a little less one sided. Those other people are bad. They are on the wrong side of history. Why should I compromise? They must wear every bad thing about Trump. I must own absolutely nothing about what my party’s done.

They especially won’t see cause to chill out a bit when they’re correct and hammering a rhetorical advantage. Jackie Robinson is a storied icon with a massive approval rating. He served in the military and military officials just glibly overlooked the aspect where he was court martialed due to racism. It’s a really stupid way to generate a news cycle and what happened is downstream of administration ideology, to a degree. I certainly get making an issue of it.

At the same time, the admin quickly restored the site, and it would be a straw man to suggest that anyone with status on the right literally considers the 1949 N.L. MVP to be a “DEI hire.” Nobody died. We’re not forgetting about Jackie Robinson due to fear of Trump Gulag. I’m not sure we need theoretically non partisan sports media people to belabor the point like it’s still 2020 when they never hold their own side to any scrutiny.

I mostly disagree with the “stick to sports!” crowd. Sometimes politics and sports collide, which is partially why I have this site. The issue, in legacy sports media, isn’t that people sometimes talk about an intersection with politics. It’s that they’re so biased as to make any crossover into politics feel like propaganda.