I’ll admit to a fondness for the old song for “Monday Night Football,” by Hank Williams, Jr., which opened broadcasts between 1989 and 2011. When Hank would howl, “Are you ready for some football?,” the answer was always an enthusiastic yes. This was back when the prospect of watching a bunch of big and fast guys crack heads seemed like an innocent pleasure, and not the obvious moral morass that it is today. But times changed—and, specifically, they changed for Williams, who, in 2011, was dumped from the “Monday Night Football” broadcast after he went on Fox News and called Democrats “the enemy,” and illustrated his point by comparing the sight of President Obama playing golf with John Boehner to seeing “Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu.”
And then, as they do, the times changed back. On Monday night, Williams returned to “M.N.F.,” performing his signature song, alongside the crossover-country group Florida Georgia Line and the pop star Jason Derulo. The song has been tweaked several times through the years to suit various musical moments, but this version was a special kind of Frankenstein’s monster: Williams’s original blues-rock combined with modern country, E.D.M., and a lot of Auto-Tune. The song was greeted with jeers, not simply because it sounded ridiculous but because, for many viewers, that sound was inseparable from what they saw as a series of bad decisions by ESPN, which recently has become, largely against its will, a central player in the pervasive culture war of Trump’s America.
People on the left hated the song because it had too much Hank, Jr.—bringing him back seemed like a form of appeasement by ESPN to the nostalgia of conservative viewers, who have accused the network of perpetuating a liberal bias. People on the right, meanwhile, hated the song because it didn’t have enough Hank, Jr.—his roughneck, Southern-pride, blue-collar voice had been marginalized in the new song, giving way to slick modern beats. Everyone else hated the song, because, well, it’s a mess. But it’s a particular kind of mess, and one that tracks with some of the issues plaguing ESPN. The network has lost more than twelve million cable subscribers since 2011; in April, it laid off roughly a hundred employees, two years after it laid off more than three hundred. There are two basic explanations for this retrenchment. One, based in fact, points to a decline in the number of cable subscribers in the United States, and thus a decline in the number of people who pay, through their cable packages, for ESPN. The other, based on alt-right fairy dust and angry tweets, suggests that ESPN is losing viewers because of the network’s sinister, coördinated shift to the left, which has been driving away conservative and moderate viewers.
Critics on the right don’t have the numbers to prove this, but they had plenty of prominent examples of ESPN’s so-called liberal bias: the celebration of Caitlyn Jenner; the firing of the former ace turned conservative firebrand Curt Schilling; the positive coverage of the national-anthem protests by Colin Kaepernick and other N.F.L. players; the prominence of younger, progressive on-air talent, including Bomani Jones, Dan Le Batard, Jemele Hill, and Michael Smith. In these criticisms, there is often an unfortunate and reflexive conflation of “liberal” with simple diversity—a seeming discomfort with the new reality that the people talking about sports on TV look, finally, like the athletes who play those sports.
Talking about the waning of ESPN as a story of eroding subscription rates and ad buys is boring. But the idea that a major television network shot itself in the foot by alienating a large portion of its viewership, a demographic that also happened to be the same “forgotten Americans” who helped put Donald Trump in the White House—well, that’s exciting. And so, regardless of the plain truth, sites like Outkick the Coverage and Breitbart, through sheer persistence, have managed to reframe ESPN’s business problem as a culture problem.
Even ESPN seems confused about what is really happening, and, perhaps unaccustomed to losing revenue, the network has been acting strangely. The story of the football announcer Robert Lee was the most recent bizarre swerve. Lee, who is Asian-American, was scheduled to call the University of Virginia’s opening game against William & Mary, on September 2nd. But, in the days after the terrorist attack at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, ESPN said it was pulling Lee from the broadcast, because he shared the same name as General Robert E. Lee. ESPN’s decision became a highly publicized fiasco, a jumbled mess of obtuse and misapplied identity politics: a young announcer was replaced on a broadcast because, well, no one was quite sure. Because his name might remind people of the tragedy? Or else somehow seem like an endorsement of the Confederate general’s statue? The president of ESPN, John Skipper, argued that the network was trying to protect Lee from “social hectoring and trolling.” More likely, some worried executives imagined seeing the words Robert Lee, Virginia, and ESPN together in a headline and decided that stories pointing out what was clearly a coincidence might somehow be worse than the ones revealing that ESPN had become scared of its own shadow.
It wasn’t always this hard. ESPN used to be just a sports network, not an institution of such size and influence that it could serve as the proxy battleground for America’s great reckoning with itself. James Andrew Miller, who co-wrote the definitive oral history of ESPN, told the Times that the network would prefer “to be as far away from geopolitical and cultural issues as they can be. . . . If they could build a biosphere where all that stuff is out of the equation, they would.” There was a time when the likes of Hank Williams, Jr., Florida Georgia Line, and Jason Derulo on a stage together, making a once-beloved jingle about a football game just a little worse, would have been nothing more than a dull and predictable stab at cross-cultural marketing. The audience for football, until recently, seemed to be general and unified—old and young, white and black, and everyone very, very ready for some football. Now these performers look absurd standing next to one another, as incongruous as the idea that “all my rowdy friends,” as Williams puts it in his song, might include everyone, wanting the same things in the same America.
Update: On Wednesday, ESPN found itself at the center of another political firestorm, and again managed to satisfy no one. On Monday, the “SportsCenter” host Jemele Hill tweeted, in a back-and-forth with other users, that President Trump was a white supremacist, that his election was the result of white supremacy, and that he was “ignorant” and “unqualified and unfit to be president.” A day later, ESPN issued a statement saying that Hill’s opinions do not reflect those of the network and calling her actions “inappropriate.” Once again, people on both the left and the right were outraged. ESPN had been judged too conservative in denouncing Hill’s political expression. Or else it was too progressive because it did not immediately suspend or fire her. Deadspin wrote that ESPN, by calling Hill’s Twitter posts inappropriate, “felt that it had to grovel before the racist uncle demographic so as to not give off the impression that it leans left.” After reading ESPN’s statement, Clay Travis, of Outkick the Coverage and Fox Sports Radio, tweeted, “Got it. So you can say whatever you want as long as you’re liberal @espn. MSESPN gonna MSESPN, y’all.” On Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, responded to a question about Hill’s tweets by saying, “I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments that anyone can make, and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN.” The network has yet to respond as to whether it is taking its cue on personnel decisions from the White House.
