Sports media has shifted right, now it's time to shut down the grievance machine

Edit by Liam McGuire

It’s officially a new day in sports media.

Thursday, Barstool Sports and Fox Sports announced a wide-ranging partnership that will see the bro-coded digital media company play a prominent role in Fox’s sports programming. Barstool will produce a daily morning show for FS1, and founder Dave Portnoy will appear weekly on Fox’s flagship college football show, Big Noon Kickoff.

Naturally, the move was celebrated by some of the most prominent right-wing sports personalities. Jason Whitlock called July 16 “the day Woke Sports surrendered,” citing the Barstool-Fox tie-up and Shane Gillis’ ESPYS monologue. OutKick founder Clay Travis concurred, writing, “sane sports fans have won a major cultural battle.”

But the Barstool deal wasn’t necessarily a tipping point. American sports media’s pronounced shift away from left-wing politics has been years in the making.

Most would agree that the apex of the left’s influence on sports media came in 2020-21 as the COVID pandemic took hold, the Black Lives Matter movement reached its pinnacle, and the American electorate rebuked Trumpism.

At that time, leagues read the room to meet the cultural moment. The NFL added “end racism” text to the end zone. NBA players wore jerseys with slogans like “Group Economics,” where a nameplate would typically be located. Scandals like Jon Gruden’s racist emails were swiftly addressed, with the coach fired mid-season amid pressure from the league.

At the same time, ESPN faced an exodus of right-wing talent. Network staples like Sage Steele and Allison Williams exited in large part over the company’s vaccination mandate. Will Cain bolted the network for Fox News. All the while, conservative media made fervent counters to the social causes leagues had taken a stand on, and offered refuge for those who dared to position themselves against “woke” policies.

The seeds had been planted.

Fast-forward four years, Donald Trump is president again, UFC CEO Dana White is planning an event at the White House, the NFL has removed its anti-racism messaging, MLB had downplayed diversity and recently returned its All-Star Game to Atlanta after relocating it four years ago due to restrictive voting legislation, Fox has purchased OutKick and partnered with Barstool, ESPN has leaned into bro culture with Pat McAfee, outlets like the left-leaning Deadspin have shuttered, star athletes are doing the Trump dance, NBA players are talking politics less frequently, and the social media platform favored by most sports fans, X, algorithmically defaults to the right-wing orthodoxy on any given topic.

Where the pendulum had been firmly left-of-center four years ago, it has now swung firmly right.

Rather than releasing statements that once would’ve invoked cries of “virtue signaling” from the right, leagues and media companies are now kowtowing to Trump to curry favor and/or avoid getting called out on Truth Social.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell visited the White House to announce that the NFL Draft will be hosted in Washington, D.C., in 2027. ESPN eagerly aired a statement from Trump during halftime of the College Football Playoff National Championship. The network’s parent company, Disney, settled a frivolous lawsuit with Trump to the tune of $16 million, as did CBS’s parent company, Paramount. Fox Corporation patriarch Rupert Murdoch sat in Trump’s luxury box during the FIFA Club World Cup along with FIFA president Gianni Infantino. PGA Tour executives and players have met with the President numerous times to try to hammer out the ongoing divide with LIV Golf.

Four years ago, Donald Trump was persona non grata to all of the above entities, even Fox. (Just read what Murdoch had to say about Trump during his deposition in the Dominion lawsuit.) Now, the President is a friend.

The moves by these businesses and, obviously, the reelection of Trump, signaled a cultural shift. A shift that leagues and media companies have capitalized on.

But it’s created a weird dynamic for the grievance warriors in right-wing media. Outlets that have primarily come to prominence based on their coverage of perceived left-wing media favoritism now don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Travis’ OutKick, for instance, still covers the transgender participation in sports debate in front-page stories daily, long after the mainstream media has moved on as polling shows most Americans agree with the broad strokes of OutKick’s position already. Outlets like Fox News are still eager to cover the infrequent instances where an ESPN anchor says something you might hear a Pod Save America host say.

Meanwhile, Pat McAfee is on ESPN every day and still allows Aaron Rodgers to discuss right-wing culture war topics at length. The face of ESPN, Stephen A. Smith, frequently appears on Fox News’ Hannity and has hosted numerous conservative commentators on his own podcast. Shows like Around the Horn and High Noon, which, admittedly, attracted left-leaning panelists, have been canceled by the network.

Now, Fox Sports is getting in the game too by partnering with Dave Portnoy, who himself frequently appears on Fox News and is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

My question to the grievance warriors out there is simple. What else is there to complain about? Is it time to finally retire the victim card once and for all? (Or at least until the pendulum inevitably swings back leftward in some undetermined period of time?)

The constant complaints are tiresome and, for any objective observer, typically made in bad faith. Sports media is very clearly no longer “woke,” so it’s time to stop acting like it is.

That plea will likely fall on deaf ears. The right-wing outrage complex is far too lucrative to give up its crusade against the mainstream media, even if those outlets are no longer displaying any left-wing bias. To watch ESPN now is to watch a network wholly dedicated to sports coverage, sans the two hours per day when The Pat McAfee Show could talk about literally anything. Or, in the case of the ESPYS, when Shane Gillis is making Jeffrey Epstein jokes. Yet on Thursday, OutKick ran headlines like “You’ll Never Guess The One Miserable Ex-ESPN Staffer Who Took Offense To Shane Gillis’ ESPYs Monologue.” Fox News ran “Sports pundit Sarah Spain slams Shane Gillis over ‘hacky’ jokes about female athletes.”

Here’s a tip: if your outrage about ESPN is directed at someone who doesn’t even work there anymore, maybe you’ve already given up the gig. Perhaps you’re not making an earnest critique of the network, or at least not of the network as it currently stands. Maybe you’re simply trying to feed your readers red meat.

You’d think these outlets would perhaps want to use this new opportunity to provide critique or commentary on the programming itself. Try out some new material. Prove to audiences that you’re excited to talk, you know, sports, since “sticking to sports” was the calling card for so long. Instead, these sites would still have you believe the most prominent voices in the space are kneeling during the national anthem while wearing Kente cloth.

At this point, it’s just another made-up bogeyman. Another perversion of right-wing media designed to drum up controversy when there’s none there.

The last six months in the industry — from the schmoozefests between media and league execs and Donald Trump, to the mainstreaming of a right-wing demigod like Dave Portnoy and Barstool on one of the most prominent sports media platforms in the country — should tell you all you need to know. The right is no longer the victim. They’re now the beneficiary of a cultural shift that mainstream media outlets have latched onto.

The only question now is, will they act like it? Can they?

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