Just before flying to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl this week, Clay Travis revealed his prediction for the game on his popular sports podcast OutKick. The San Francisco 49ers would defeat the Kansas City Chiefs.
Other topics covered in this episode: the future of college football and whether President Biden is “actually capable” of serving in the White House.
“That will be the question we continue to address for you,” Mr. Travis said.
The Super Bowl may be the one event that can bring Americans of all stripes together, but talk about it — and about sports as a whole — is increasingly splintering along partisan lines. A growing number of sports pundits and personalities are eagerly connecting sports and politics and, like other media outlets, are exploiting the thriving market of partisanship.
This class of sports commentators reside largely on the right side of the political spectrum, where they have become loud and influential voices, reaching audiences that traditional coverage of politics often ignores. (Analysts suspect that viewer demographics explain at least part of the rightward trend of these shows. Sports talk listeners tend to skew male, as do Republican voters.)
Among those jumping into the political pool is Stephen A. Smith, an ESPN star who frequently appears on Fox News and hosts an independent podcast where he weighs in on Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy and the war in Ukraine complained. “Trump is close to being re-elected because when he was in office there was a thriving economy,” Mr. Smith said this week.
The trend could be a result of the increase in all types of commentary in sports media, as once-dominant highlight shows have been largely overtaken by viral clips on the Internet, said Travis Vogan, a professor at the University of Iowa who studies sports media.
“Sports culture is pretty conservative,” Mr. Vogan said. “The way you cut through all the noise is by being provocative and dangling red meat in front of your audience.”
But Mr. Travis said he wasn’t just trolling with outrage. He wants to influence the political discussion.
“Arguing about who will win the Super Bowl is a random, funny thing. No one’s life changes depending on who wins the Super Bowl. Whoever wins an election changes lives,” Mr. Travis said in an interview. “It’s important to me to be able to talk about things that really matter.”
Here’s a cheat sheet to the new political sports talk:
Who is on the starting grid?
In recent years, digital media company Barstool Sports has become the target of a young, male-dominated, libertarian counterculture known in some circles as “Barstool conservatism.” His most popular show, the sports talker “Pardon My Take,” is regularly ranked among Apple’s top 20 podcasts.
Although overtly political content is not common at Barstool, the brand — whose founder Dave Portnoy is a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump — often criticizes so-called cancel culture and popular progressive causes. A two-minute video in which Mr. Portnoy claimed that YouTube was censoring him, for example, has received more than 10 million views on X since it was posted in November.
Mr Portnoy last month announced a partnership with Rumble, the streaming platform popular with right-wing figures such as Alex Jones and Roger Stone. News of the deal increased Rumble’s value by around $500 million.
Mr. Travis, a lawyer who began his career in sports by writing columns for CBS, founded his media company OutKick in 2011 and sold it to Fox Corporation in 2021. In its mission statement, the company defines its role as “revelation.” the destructive nature of “woke” activism” and describes itself as “the antidote to the mainstream sports media, which often serves an elitist, left-leaning minority rather than the American sports fan.”
According to Comscore, a media measurement service, OutKick saw a 65 percent increase in unique monthly visitors to its site last year compared to 2022, averaging 7.2 million monthly viewers. In addition to his daily half-hour “OutKick” podcast, Mr. Travis co-hosts a three-hour talk radio show that airs on more than 400 radio stations in the timeslot once hosted by “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” Curt Schilling, the World Series-winning pitcher who was fired by ESPN for making anti-transgender comments, also has a show on OutKick.
Mr. Smith, best known for his politics-free daytime show “First Take,” surprised fans with an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News in 2022 and now appears regularly on the network. In late September, he launched his own podcast, independent of ESPN, in which he said he could expand his “interests beyond the court or field.”
Perhaps no show has made as many headlines in recent memory as “The Pat McAfee Show,” a lunchtime feast featuring beefy men in neon tank tops. Mr. McAfee, a former National Football League player, worked for Barstool for two years before ESPN picked up his current show.
Although Mr. McAfee focuses only on sports, he gained attention for providing Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets’ star quarterback, with a friendly platform to share his anti-vaccination views.
ESPN did not respond to a request for comment about the political content of Mr. McAfee’s or Mr. Smith’s show.
Mr. McAfee said his show focuses on sports. “I’m pretty sure no one wants to hang out with us and hear us talk politics,” he wrote on the social media site X.
What about sports talk for Democrats?
There is no left-of-center analogue to these right-wing sports shows. In Mr. Travis’s view, that’s because the mainstream sports conversation is already tilted toward Democrats.
He pointed to what he said was ESPN’s positive coverage of several major cultural crossover events, including Michael Sam becoming the first openly gay player drafted by the NFL and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem.
Sports media veterans dispute this characterization, arguing that mainstream sports coverage and most major sports commentators follow a “stick to sports” ethos.
“I always told my anchors, ‘Please don’t talk politics,'” said Mark Chernoff, who spent three decades directing programming at WFAN, the country’s first all-sports radio station. “Whatever side you take, you will immediately lose half your audience.”
Others said criticism of mainstream coverage came largely from people who specifically wanted their sports to be covered with a political bias.
“There’s a crazy feeling in some circles that if the coverage isn’t obviously conservative, then it’s liberal,” said Jemele Hill, a former ESPN anchor who was suspended in 2017 for describing Mr. Trump on social media as ” “white supremacists”. She left ESPN the next year.
Ms. Hill said there was “no liberal alternative” because media companies had shown no willingness to invest in left-leaning sports programming.
That’s a missed opportunity for media investors, said Keith Olbermann, a former ESPN anchor who turned liberal political pundit on MSNBC and now hosts the podcast “Countdown.” The market can support a sports show with a progressive approach, he said.
“That’s part of the left’s problem,” Mr. Olbermann said. “We don’t shop for an audience.”
What do you think of Taylor?
Back in September, news that Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop star, was romantically involved with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce caused a stir on the right. But as the team reached the Super Bowl, some turned their outrage up to 11, spreading the conspiracy theory that the couple’s relationship was an elaborate CIA “psy operation” aimed at securing Mr Biden’s re-election.
What is noteworthy is that this conspiracy theory did not fall under the purview of sports pundits who are serious about politics. Mr. Travis called the Swift-induced meltdown an absurd distraction from the game at hand, and Mr. Smith, who took his daughter to a Taylor Swift concert, told Sports Illustrated this week that the intense attention the relationship enjoyed made him ” disturbed”. receive.
Jason Whitlock, an ardent Trump supporter and commentator who once said the left supports “satanic” ideas, isn’t buying Swift’s panic. Mr. Whitlock has worked for ESPN, Fox and OutKick and now hosts a podcast on Blaze Media, the conservative platform founded by former Fox News host Glenn Beck.
“We need to get out of Taylor Swift Disorder Syndrome because that’s what’s happening,” he said.
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2024-02-10 19:22:50
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