When sportscasters veer left

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

As college basketball’s NCAA Tournament gets underway, the divide between fans and sportscasters is becoming more apparent. The sports blog Outkick the Coverage reported this week that ESPN is cutting $100 million in salaries.

“That business collapse at ESPN has caused a panic at the network, a desperate grab for relevance that has led to a pronounced leftward move,” according to the blog. “ESPN’s trying desperately to stay relevant as ratings collapse and subscribers flee. The decision? ‘We’ll be MS-ESPN, the home for far left wing politics and sports!’ Only, it’s not working.”

John Stonestreet said politics have always intersected sports, but the latest shift is something else.

“It’s gone beyond covering these political aspects of sports to actually advancing agendas,” Stonestreet said.

ESPN does not carry any of the games in the NCAA Tournament, but fans rely on it for highlights and analysis. The best sports coverage, Stonestreet said, celebrates hard work, strategy, creativity, and human accomplishment.

“That’s why people love sports. It’s something that speaks to, in a microcosm, what it means to be human,” he said. Good sports coverage will naturally conflict with the LGBT agenda, which seeks to redefine what it is to be human.

“When the new mark of courage is not doing anything courageous, but just announcing one’s preferences or confusion on the air, this is not the same thing as rising to the occasion and landing a very important performance,” Stonestreet said. “The media are not on the same page as American people, even when it comes to sports.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the March 17, 2017, edition of The World and Everything in It.