The above may feel like an obvious headline that proves itself, but when a goliath like ESPN anoints itself the “worldwide leader,” it’s worth stopping and taking stock of what their brand of leadership looks like.
ESPN initially came to prominence around the end of the 20th century, thanks to college sports and an army of elder millennials, like me, raised on early SportsCenter icons like Stuart Scott, Dan Patrick, and yes, even Keith Olbermann. It gained prominence as an irreverent and earnest look at sports from the perspective of youth culture, and ESPN won a generation of lucrative broadcast deals on the back of this cultural victory. Alongside it, they have won many awards for capital-J Journalism, and produced seminal investigative TV shows like Outside the Lines that made sports more honest and transparent. You’ll note that I’m using the past tense here.
Current day ESPN looks nothing like the network that gained all the credibility Pat McAfee now spends on “ruining” college freshman girls’ lives on his multi-million-dollar TV show. A litany of recent events have further exposed the cynicism and rot at the heart of the sun that sports revolves around, reflecting the decay inside sports themselves all going through varying existential crises surrounding the kind of greed ESPN has made its north star.
A network firing countless journalists while giving mega pay raises to hot take artists like McAfee and Stephen A. Smith is openly stating how much it prioritizes the kind of journalism that made ESPN a trusted source for sports news. Thinking it could get away with placing an ESPN Bet ad on every broadcast while pretending to do journalism was another bleak marker of how well done they like their golden goose in ESPN’s executive suite. This network used to stand for something amidst all the profit taking it has earned and then exploited for itself over the past few decades. You can hear it in former ESPN executive John Skipper’s dismayed takes about his old network every time he’s on Pable Torre Finds Out.
This was another recent badge of dishonor earned by ESPN, which filed a story before the NBA’s judgment came out on the Los Angeles Clippers salary cap circumvention investigation concluded, saying that the league’s law firm at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz would return nothing that could punish Clippers owner Steve Ballmer or the team. The NBA immediately released a statement saying this story from their top sports reporters “contains numerous and significant inaccuracies,” while Pablo Torre, who broke this story and whose dogged investigation forced the league’s hand, said on a recent episode that ESPN never reached out to him for comment on their report saying his reporting was full of shit. He even wrote in to his former employer with a comment that wasn’t included in that story that the NBA said was full of shit. What exactly does ESPN consider to be journalism these days?
Torre intimated on his broadcast that essentially, ESPN published the Clippers’ legal defense they had been aggressively shopping ever since Torre put these revelations into the public sphere a year ago. You can see the shadow of this with former ESPN writer and podcaster Bill Simmons, writing a public letter to the Clippers demanding they let him out of his season ticket commitment because he was also being told by his Clippers sources that Torre’s investigation was way off base. It seems like many people in sports media bought the Clippers’ version of events despite all evidence to the contrary, and now some of ESPN’s top NBA reporters find themselves on the opposite side of the largest penalty the NBA has ever given out, and the group of journalists who won a Pulitzer for exposing this scheme that now is being probed as a criminal investigation by the federal government! Great job everyone!
Why would ESPN so credulously publish the Clippers’ version of events, when Torre’s version includes proof that Clippers sponsor Aspiration believed that Kawhi Leonard was exponentially more marketable than Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake? Why did we have to pretend at Mark Cuban’s behest that this wasn’t what it looked like every step of the way after that evidence came out? Well, ESPN is in business with the Clippers. They own a portion of NBA broadcast rights, and the resistance at every point of this investigation has stemmed from the fact that Steve Ballmer, the wealthiest owner in sports, has been very good for the business of the NBA. He bought a moribund franchise being ruined by a cheap racist even by sports ownership’s staggeringly low standards, turned it into a consistent playoff contender and built a state-of-the-art arena.
All that investment helped inflate the Clippers’ franchise value which set off a string of dominoes that now leads to the richest sale of any sports franchise ever, the Los Angeles Lakers to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12 billion. It’s a lot easier to punish Donald Sterling for being caught saying stunningly racist garbage when he’s ruining a valuable asset in your second largest media market, but no one in the NBA wants to give Steve Ballmer a sports death penalty, despite all the evidence demonstrating this repeat offender has earned it.
But this is bad for the NBA so it’s bad for ESPN and so given everything else currently going on with this network’s other alleged independent broadcasts, it’s hard not to see this story as part of a much larger trend: ESPN’s journalism takes a backseat the moment it intersects with ESPN’s financial interests. They recently hosted Ted Cruz being booed mercilessly on College Gameday to stump for a college sports bill that does not have as widespread support as ESPN and Nick Saban’s commercials make it seem, and they did not host the NAACP President who offered to show up on College Gameday in Mississippi this past week to make the counterpoint against Cruz’s case for it. This ordeal has led to blowback from many non-ESPN corners of the internet, and former Texas and NFL QB Chris Simms said it best on Pro Football Talk to Mike Florio.
Chris Simms my GOAT. He’s 100% spot on here
— Nick Juskewycz (@itssked.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 11:43 PM
I know it’s shocking to hear that Ted Cruz-endorsed legislation in Washington D.C. is friendly to entrenched interests, but it’s true. This bill is not crafted in the interest of the athletes, but in the interest of the college football powers whose phone calls to Congresspeople get returned, like the C-suite at ESPN. College Gameday‘s Kirk Herbstreit, the perfect ESPN guy as someone long in the business of Kirk Herbstreit, followed this public embarrassment up by feigning a truly stunning amount ignorance about one of America’s most famous politicians who ran for president in 2016.
The baseline level of Dumb Guy Pretending To Be Even Dumber in our culture is incredibly high at the moment, but this is an all-time performance in that category. Hall of Fame work in any era.
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 3:27 PM
Yeah. ESPN is totally apolitical. A wholly uninterested party owned by one of the largest publicly traded companies on earth. All of ESPN’s emperors are totally wearing clothes and not wandering around naked in a haze and demanding to be taken seriously as a midcard WWE jobber becomes the face of the network.
Pat McAfee: “We certainly appreciate the hell out of the American military. And if you’re not the United States of America and you hear that sound, your ass better run.”
Rece Davis: “That’s the one thing the two sides here can agree on, for sure.”
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) September 19, 2026 at 7:19 AM
This is genuinely sad. ESPN is the most expensive channel in a cable package for a reason. Sports are the lone place Americans can still come to congregate at scale, and ESPN is the home of sports. Or was, at least. Now it’s just like everything else we used to hold up as special and unique. Stuart Scott could never arise from modern day ESPN. He’d get stuck in the great middle along with everyone else wedged underneath the two most overpaid men in America whose only media talent is inciting people on camera. In another lifetime, Stephen A. Smith did and could call himself a journalist, but as he has made himself the center of so many feuds with athletes ESPN covers like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, his credibility has degraded at roughly the same pace as ESPN’s has. He’s a TV character now just like the former NFL punter who was a part of the worst play in NFL history, and suborning its journalism to their braindead hot takes is the defining ethos of this era of ESPN.
Sports’ soul is for sale to the highest bidder, and Kevin Hart is offering you a DraftKings promo for three free bets along with it. The degraded world around you is the world that capitalism hath wrought. A world without magic. A world without a soul. Without culture. Without any value for any kind of human endeavor that doesn’t have a profit motive attached to it. “Booyah!” could not embed itself into the zeitgeist like it did if the GOAT spoke it into existence today, simply because ESPN has made itself far less important to the culture through its relentless profit motive making it just like everything else in this crumbling era defined by greed, hubris and a severe deficit of any adults in charge in any position of power in America.
