Sports

In a Sports Illustrated "Off the Board" podcast released on Thursday, ESPN's Scott Van Pelt took several cheap shots at the network's critics, in the process demonstrating how horribly out of touch he is with financial realities at his network. Van Pelt aimed particular venom at those who have decided that they didn't need to have cable TV any more when ESPN selected Caitlyn-formerly-Bruce Jenner…

It has been known at least since Saturday that the three UCLA basketball players detained in China on shoplifting charges and forced to stay in the country while the rest of the team went home were accused of stealing merchandise from three stores. Somehow, that news never got through to Vox.com's John Kirby, who shortly after noon on Thursday, claimed that the trio had only stolen "a pair of…

Jay Busbee has been a "writer for Yahoo Sports since 2008" who "has covered the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, the Masters, the Indianapolis 500, the Kentucky Derby, the Final Four, NBA, NCAA football, and the MLB playoffs." It's hard to believe that someone with this level of experience can actually believe that reported "attendance" at National Football League games represents the number of…

The unease among advertisers over falling National Football League TV ratings is starting to boil over. One of the league's major sponsors is considering pulling the plug on its NFL advertising next year, and, according to Business Insider's Mike Shields, other "brands are threatening to pull ads from NFL coverage if NBC keeps covering players' national-anthem protests." If those ad dollars go…

Last week, Anthony Crupi at AdAge.com was either willfully ignorant or deliberately deceptive when he claimed that the size of the National Football League's TV ratings decline is inconsequential. Crupi also appears to be quite wrong in contending that actual game attendance — not reported attendance, but "turnstile" attendance — during the 2017 season is only barely down compared to last year.

Mistake-prone ESPN just keeps making one bad decision after another. The list of errors in judgment is rapidly growing and badly damaging the sports network. In recent days ESPN finally got around to correcting its two latest mistakes: 1) suspending Sports Center co-anchor Jemele Hill for inappropriate tweets and 2) and ending a brief partnership with Barstool Sports.

Proving that the l-words liberalism and logic don't go together with left-stream "journalism," The Sporting News' David Steele raves about San Francisco 49ers' owner Jed York as the one voice of reason among NFL leaders on Colin Kaepernick and the protesters. Just one little problem here: York's team is the club that kind of cut Kaepernick and ended his pro career.

Tuesday’s edition of ABC’s World News Tonight was a prime example of how sensationalism in journalism damages credibility. Instead of leading the show by reporting on something important like CBS did with the opioid epidemic, or political conflict like NBC, ABC chose to celebrate the NFL seemingly not requiring players to stand during the National Anthem at a meeting earlier in the day. But the…

In a season best described as one of perpetual "fourth-and-long" for the NFL, the league and its broadcast partners today received more bad news about TV ratings and their ever-thinning pocket books. How the NFL is responding to its second successive season of protest-induced slump is an astounding decision to pursue even more fan-alienating social justice activism!

After downplaying NFL commissioner Roger Goodell calling for an end to National Anthem protests one week earlier, on Tuesday, NBC’s Today lobbied hard for team owners to reach a “compromise” with players at an upcoming League meeting over the “thorny, touchy topic” of showing respect for the Anthem.

Monday’s network morning shows all promoted former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick suing the NFL and claiming that all 32 League teams were in “collusion” against hiring him, despite a complete lack of evidence for his claims.

One of the reasons we call liberals the alt-left is their opposition to anything traditional or normal -- like free speech, patriotism or marriage. Marriage has been a particular target of the left for many years. Forget the campaign for gay marriage. The left hates the institution, but it’s easier to wreck it from within than without. As The Establishment puts it, “marriage sits at the red-hot…

In theory, the larger and stronger a nation’s private sector, the more robust and diverse its news media. Nonetheless, New York’s Eric Levitz suggested on Tuesday that the American media aren’t robust enough. As Levitz sees it, though “democracy cannot function without a well-funded, adversarial press...market incentives do not adequately reward news outlets for investing in high-impact…

On Thursday's New Day, during a discussion of whether the NFL should require players to stand during the National Anthem, conservative CNN commentator Ben Ferguson and liberal Republican CNN commentator Ana Navarro got into a heated debate after Ferguson called Colin Kaepernick a "fraud" because he used the Flag to protest provocatively without even taking the time to vote.