Jason Whitlock: How Gawker-Created Shitty Website Deadspin Corrupted ESPN

Jason Whitlock has been opining a lot lately that sports culture has been driven leftward by Silicon Valley tech billionaires, and turned into a Clickbait Culture driven less and less by actual sporting news and more and more by ginned up Social Justice Warrior outrages (and false outrages).

In the Wall Street Journal, he puts some meat on that skeleton of a storyline.

What has truly impeded ESPN from overcoming its financial mistakes and inability to adapt to technological advances? The decadelong culture war ESPN lost to Deadspin, a snarky, politically progressive sports blog launched by Gawker's Nick Denton in 2005.

While the mainstream media has failed to document the extent of Deadspin's rout of ESPN, I haven't. I worked at ESPN twice, BD and AD. Before Deadspin (2001-06) and After Deadspin (2013-15).

...

Deadspin significantly elevated the price of implementing change at ESPN. The often-caustic blog mastered search-engine optimization and Twitter's ability to gin up faux outrage. Its writers trolled ESPN talent and executives, getting plenty of attention along the way. The site particularly delighted in exposing alleged sexual malfeasance among ESPN employees.

He writes about Deadspin's penchant for spinning stories of sex scandals among ESPN personnel, even with virtually no evidence.

Rather than sue Mr. Denton's bullying internet pirates into submission the way tech billionaire Peter Thiel did, ESPN chose to acquiesce and adopt progressive ideology and diversity as groundbreaking business innovations. ESPN is the exact network Deadspin desired. It's diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product.

He seems to be saying that Deadspin ginned up enough Prog Hatred -- and revelations of affairs and lewd behavior, both imagined and real -- against ESPN that ESPN eventually capitulated and became the Enforcement of Social Progressivism Network that Deadspin wanted, just to call off the SJW dogs.

But you'll have to read the article to see if you think that's what he's saying. It seems to me he's saying that, but I sense that the article has been edited and he's rephrased some things to make it not quite clear.

posted by Ace at 03:23 PM

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