ESPN accused of having an enduring racist culture behind the camera

The New York Times

ESPN's Black employees have begun speaking out on the sports giant's everyday racism and barriers in a series of conference calls and meetings in the wake of racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's death and the Black Lives Matter movement. The New York Times' Kevin Draper spoke with more than two dozen current and former ESPN employees, on the record and anonymously, who "described a company that projected a diverse outward face, but did not have enough Black executives, especially ones with real decision-making power. They said the company did not provide meaningful career paths for Black employees behind the camera and made decisions based on assumptions that its average viewer is an older white man, in spite of its audience trends." A story reported last week of ESPN announcer Dave LaMont complaining that one conference call amounted to a griping session for Black employees especially resonated. “It was such a slap in the face,” said Maria Taylor, a rising star at ESPN, who was speaking during the call when LaMont interrupted her. “When I was in it, that was horrible. But now, looking back, it was an awakening moment. This is part of our culture. There are people that feel this way.” As Draper notes, "ESPN presents a fairly diverse face to the outside world across its slate of programming, and its news editors and reporters are more diverse than most of its competitors and sports departments in newsrooms nationwide. A 2018 report found that ESPN employed a significant percentage of the country’s Black, Latino and female assistant sports editors and columnists. But current and former employees say that things are very different behind the camera." Draper found that Black ESPN employees on camera were more willing to criticize the network. “So many of the Black people we have at ESPN have been worthy of promotions and other opportunities long before this happened,” said SportsCenter anchor Michael Eaves. Stephen A. Smith, perhaps ESPN's biggest star, pointed out that ESPN keeps appointing white executives to oversee coverage of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. “There are a plethora of people that have come through ESPN that I thought could do some very positive things for ESPN about that bottom line,” said Smith. “They happened to be Black, and I don’t believe they have been put in those positions.” Former ESPN president John Skipper pointed to the internal backlash over the 6 p.m. SportsCenter hosted by Jemele Hill and Michael Smith that brought an unapologetically Black spirit to the long-running sports news and highlights show. “Pretty quickly, that was a show that people internally criticized,” says Skipper. “We had plenty of times where we had shows that didn’t work with nondiverse talent on them, and people never said, ‘You went too far with those two white guys.'" Current ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro, who succeeded Skipper in March 2018, said he's laid out a series of changes to address the network's diversity problem. “We are going to speak through our actions here, and we are going to improve,” Pitaro said. “If we don’t, it is on me, I failed, because it does all start with me.”