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Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.
I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.
Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.
I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.
Yes, but 2020 was four years ago. It was a whole presidential administration. A lot has happened since then. The BLM overreaction effort they put in is exactly what I'm talking about when I say they've done a lot to soothe liberals.
It used to be that sports media was more or less conservative, and the liberal media criticizing it was made up largely of people who hate sports. Now the sports media is largely liberal. And the right wing attacks on it are from people who seem to hate sports, like Vivek.
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