ESPN’s Soviet-style Operating Principle

Ok, so I was watching ESPN’s re-broadcast of the 30 For 30 documentary on the Boston Red Sox’ incredible 2004 ALCS comeback against the New York Yankees and looking forward to re-living the series’ most iconic moment, ace pitcher Curt Schilling’s heroic Game Six performance where he performed on an injured ankle bleeding into his sock.
I missed that iconic Game Six, however. Everybody missed it. ESPN cut it out of the documentary, later claiming that because of time constraints it had to shorten the broadcast.
Well, these things happen. But choosing to carve out Schilling’s moment, when there are so many less important scenes to cut, seems a little odd. Equally odd would be to obliterate Abraham Lincoln from a Civil War film or Thomas Edison from the history of American invention.
When ESPN aired 30 For 30, it occurred not long after the sports network fired Schilling for posting an item on his personal Facebook page criticizing the left’s most recent national crusade, which is to allow men access to women’s restrooms. ESPN’s left-wing political leanings grow more obvious by the day, and Schilling’s crime was that he failed to keep his conservatism hidden.
So, of course, he had to go.
What I can’t quite understand, however, is ESPN’s need to rub his nose in it. To delete him from the historical record, Soviet-style. This kind of erasure is what party apparatchiks used to do in Stalin’s U.S.S.R. when their less fortunate comrades fell out of favor. They might have also banished them to Siberia, but, I guess, since the network couldn’t go quite that far it did the next best thing.
My beef with ESPN is that it is supposed to be a sports network, but for years now it has chosen to be a provocative and unabashed tool for radical political agendas. I thought it was fairly ridiculous that last year the network handed its Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Caitlyn Jenner, but what’s most egregious is its glaring inconsistencies. It won’t discipline an employee who laughs as Mike Tyson graphically describes a black man raping Sarah Palin, and it can’t be bothered to comment on another who compared Tea Party members to ISIS, just to name two of many such examples. But heaven forbid an employee disagree with its openly radical company line.
I don’t care so much that it is left-wing politics that ESPN so righteously expouses. It’s that it so happily jumps into the political sea at all. I know I speak for millions of sports fans who prefer that America’s No. 1 sports channel — a sports channel that enjoys a virtual monopoly — stick to covering sports and leave the job of dividing the American public along political lines to the likes of MSNBC and FOX.
I suppose next week we’ll learn that ESPN will soon begin administering an employment test to lessen the likelihood that it might accidentally hire more undesirables like Schilling. Perhaps it will go something like this:
— Do you support the rights of transgendered Americans to visit the restroom of their choice?
— Do you consider yourself a reasonably progressive individual, or do you more closely adhere to the views of Curt Schilling?
— Are you now, or have you ever been, a card-carrying member of a conservative political party?