"Everything is as it should be."

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ESPN's Corrosive Race Baiting

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 31 seconds

ESPN is addicted to a false racial narrative and it blinds them to basic facts.

Like the rest of the establishment media, the sports network’s obsession with race obliterates whatever was left of their credibility.

This past week two black ESPN on-air personalities made asses of themselves when they vomited out onto the public race-based nonsense devoid of any grounding in fact, which has become commonplace at the network.

On Wednesday, after it was announced the Boston Celtics were hiring Ime Udoka, a black man, as their next head coach, black ESPN basketball analyst Jay Williams, tweeted out “The first head coach of color for the celtics…& even more importantly…he is one talented individual who has paid his dues.”

Williams no doubt thought he was being a social justice stalwart with his edgy tweet, the problem was that he was egregiously wrong. The Celtics have not only had five black head coaches prior to Udona, the franchise was the first in NBA history to hire a black head coach, the great Bill Russell in 1966. Russell, KC Jones and Doc Rivers were all black Celtic coaches who won NBA titles leading the team, with Rivers doing so just 12 years ago.

Williams was called out on twitter for his error and in response claimed that he didn’t write the tweet. Maybe the culprits are the same mysterious, elusive and imaginary Russian hackers who wrote homophobic rants on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog those many years ago.

The other race-based bit of jackassery came from black NBA analyst Jalen Rose, who, when it was reported that white player Kevin Love was going to be a member of the USA Olympic basketball team, called his inclusion “tokenism” and a result of USA basketball not wanting to send an all-black team to the Olympics.

Of course, this assertion is utterly absurd as four of the last five USA basketball teams have been all black, and since 1996, only two white players, John Stockton and Kevin Love, have made the USA basketball team at all.

Williams and Rose are just marching in lockstep when it comes to pushing a racial narrative. Last year, black ESPN superstar Stephen A. Smith, the most bombastic bloviating blowhard buffoon in sports television, ranted after the Brooklyn Nets hired former two-time MVP Steve Nash, a white man, to be the head coach even though Nash had no coaching experience, that it was a function of “white privilege” and that “this does not happen for a black man”.

Once again, this was a racial narrative directly at odds with facts. Not only had black players with no coaching experience been hired by teams before, but it happened in Stephen A. Smith’s hometown of New York, when in 2013 the Nets hired Jason Kidd and in 2014 the Knicks hired Derek Fisher.

A brief glimpse of ESPN’s plethora of ‘debate’ shows like Pardon the Interruption or Around the Horn too reveals a fierce commitment to NOT debate topics but rather congratulate each other on social justice bona fides.

Even the coverage of actual sporting events is now marinated in racial and political narratives. I will never forget the absurdity of watching black side line reporter Malika Andrews doing a post-game report from the NBA bubble last summer on Scott Van Pelt’s late-night show. Andrews weeping as she claims she “prided herself on being objective” but it’s so clear the “system of objectivity in journalism is so white-washed”, and then wailing the asinine assumption that she could have been Breonna Taylor – the 26 year old killed by Louisville police in a raid where Taylor’s boyfriend fired on officers. Andrews’ unprofessionally blubbering “that could have been me” while Van Pelt soothed her paranoid delusions was the lowlight of a year of journalistic lowlights on the network.

This blatant pushing of biased and baseless race-based narratives is not only tolerated but mandated at the self-proclaimed world-wide leader in sports and its parent company, Disney, the wokest place on earth.

Williams, Rose, Smith, Andrews and the rest of ESPN talking heads pushing their racial nonsense are obviously willing to trade their credibility for a bit of social status and to kiss up to their corporate overlords. This is an annoyance to sports fans but let’s be honest, sport’s journalists without credibility are like clowns without dignity.

None of this is too surprising as this is what happens in a racial moral panic – and we are definitely in a racial moral panic, where people lose their minds, feelings override facts and narrative trumps truth.

This is how a collection of medical and scientific professionals sign a letter saying gathering in large groups during Covid is deadly – unless it’s to attend a Black Lives Matter protest. And how riots were deemed “mostly peaceful protests”. And how the lab leak theory became verboten in the establishment media because it was somehow anti-Asian. And how sharp increases in black on Asian violence was deemed a result of “white supremacy”.

From the 9-11 charade to the Iraq War/WMD fiasco to the financial collapse of 2007-2008 to the Covid calamity and the current racial hysteria, the establishment in America has, across the board, worked extremely hard to eviscerate its own credibility by egregiously obfuscating the truth and blatantly pushing their preferred, but fictional, narratives.

ESPN and the rest of the establishment media may bask in their current myopic decision to push racial propaganda instead of truth, but reality has a funny way of eventually asserting itself, and when it does, the whirlwind these charlatans will reap will be brutal, and well deserved.

 

©2021

Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, the ESPN Documentary 'The Last Dance' is Anything but Great

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds

The Last Dance is a piece of journalistically compromised, sycophantic, corporate propaganda that mindlessly fawns over its subject.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all-time, and the much-hyped ESPN ten part documentary on his career and his final championship season with the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance, which comes to a close this Sunday night, claims to reveal the man behind the legend.

I’ll save you the suspense and let you know how the movie ends…the Bulls win a sixth championship and Jordan is never challenged…not on the basketball court, or in the documentary.

You see The Last Dance isn’t so much a documentary as a piece of 90’s nostalgia porn that serves as an exercise in sports media genuflection in the form of an epic, 10-hour infomercial for the Jordan brand.

The film’s alleged claim to fame is that it reveals never-before-seen footage of Jordan during the Bull’s 1998 championship run. The problem is that Jordan himself controls the rights to this painfully banal and contrived footage, and in order to use it, producers Michael Tollin and Jon Weinbach, as well as ESPN and Netflix, had to make Jordan’s production company, Jump 23, a co-producer on the project, which means that His Airness got the last word on what does, and does not, make the final cut of The Last Dance. The result of which is more shameless hagiography than documentary.

As a business decision, ESPN and Netflix undoubtedly made the right one, as the film is being devoured by sports starved fans in the age of coronavirus, and is a runaway success with sky-high ratings.

As a journalistic decision, though, the The Last Dance traded away any semblance of journalistic integrity for the golden goose of access. Whether it is embedded journalists with troops in a warzone, or the press making deals in the halls of power, access to power is always acquiescence to power.

Evidence of which is that the The Last Dance doesn’t try to “Be Like Mike” with his trademark tenacity, instead it goes remarkably soft on its subject, and delicately dances around his pronounced shortcomings.

The Last Dance feels like one of those interviews with a politician where they are asked, “What are your greatest weaknesses”? And the politician answers, to much eye rolling, that they “work too hard and care too much”.

The docu-series reduces Jordan’s compulsive gambling and toxic bullying of teammates into simply being the result of his maniacal competitiveness. You see…according to The Last Dance, even Jordan’s personal failures are because he is so great.

The film lays it on particularly thick when teammate B.J. Armstrong claims the notoriously bullying Jordan wasn’t exactly a good guy. Jordan self-pityingly responds, in essence, that his being considered “not a nice guy” is the heavy price he had to pay for his greatness. Jordan then breaks down crying and dramatically declares the interview over. Of course, the hapless director, Jason Hehir, doesn’t dare resist his boss.

There is another telling sequence in the film dealing with Scottie Pippen’s “quitting” on his team in the final 1.8 seconds of a playoff game in 1994, when coach Phil Jackson calls on Toni Kukoc for the final shot instead of Pippen. Jordan comments in the doc that the “quitting” incident "Is always going to come back to haunt him (Pippen)…”

What is so striking about that sequence is that Jordan wasn’t playing on that Bulls team, he had “retired” at the end of the ‘93 season, supposedly because he was exhausted dealing with the difficulties of superstardom and the omnipresent media. What did Jordan do in 1994 to escape dealing with fans and the press? Did he go into seclusion? Go fishing? No. He went, with great fanfare, and played minor league baseball, and then 18 months later returned to basketball after the Bulls failed to win a title without him.

According to Jordan and the decidedly deferential The Last Dance, Pippen quit on his team for 1.8 seconds is forever tarred by it, while Jordan, who quit on his team for a full 18 months, is beyond reproach.

The docu-series doesn’t have the journalistic courage to challenge the myth of Jordan at all. If it attempted to be even mildly adversarial it might highlight that, unlike Jordan, fellow NBA greats like Magic Johnson (5 titles), Bill Russell (11 titles) and Tim Duncan (5 titles), weren’t jerks to their teammates, but inspirations.

Or that, unlike say Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, who won titles early in their careers, Jordan had to wait until all the great teams of his time, such as the Celtics, Lakers and Pistons, had aged out of their prime before he could go on his championship run in a greatly watered-down NBA due to expansion in the 90’s.

It also fails to notice that Jordan’s greatest moments during his reign came against lowly positional rivals like John Starks, Craig Ehlo and Bryon Russell…not exactly Hall of Famers.

The bottom line is this, Jordan is undeniably one of the most aesthetically and athletically dynamic icons in sports history, but The Last Dance isn’t an investigation or even contemplation of the man and his legacy, but rather a cultish coronation that unquestioningly embraces previously manufactured mythmaking. That’s not sports journalism, it’s self-serving sycophancy, and NBA fans deserve much better.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.


©2020