Having exorcised the White house of the hated Trump demon, you might think legacy media would ease up, tack toward the middle and tone down the “woke” hysteria. If the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are indicators, forget it.
On Dec. 16, New York Times media reporter Ben Smith wrote a couple of cutesy tweets indicating that both papers had interviewed Kevin Merida for the job of editor and that he was a leading candidate for both jobs. Who is Merida?
Well, his conventional lefty journo credentials are impeccable. In 2008 as a Washington Post staff writer, he denied to Newsbusters that the media were biased, then went on to write the text of a slobbering “photographic history” book on Obama’s first “historic campaign.”
But it’s what Merida’s been doing since then that’s a tip-off about what path the papers want to take. He’s an executive with ESPN and the Editor-in-Chief of its The Undefeated blog, which “explores the intersections of sports, race and culture.”
“Exploring the intersections” means finding a race and social justice angle on any given subject and passing painfully woke judgements on people and institutions. Race-baiting to you and me. ESPN itself is an unwatchable medium of race-obsessed resentment and anger, but The Undefeated’s content makes the network seem like the old Wide World of Sports. It’s loopy critical race theory applied to sports on a site that, without the Disney money and ESPN imprimatur, would be considered fringe. That’s Merida’s baby.
During Merida’s stewardship, The Undefeated has asserted that the scarcity of black NFL coaches is due to (all together now!) racism. It’s reveled in confessions of white privilege from athletes, and accused white sports fans of dehumanizing black athletes. In 2016, it posited that any opposition to Obama could only be due to racism. It’s predictably progressive on climate change, it excused the NBA and LeBron James for kowtowing to communist China and has helped hide the true nature of Black Lives Matter as it cheered on the radical group’s every incursion into sports. The examples are legion.
ESPN’s unhinged lefty slant is well-documented, and it’s alumni include moonbats Keith Olbermann and Jemel Hill. Just this week a network NFL analyst announced he had trouble rooting for Buffalo Bills QB Josh Allen because his fans “are people with American flags and dogs and skulls and crossbones …” The examples are legion.
So the Post and the LA Times are thinking of doubling down on the social justice baloney, making them even more irrelevant as “news” sources. If so, Merida may be everything either paper is looking for in a politicized, uber-woke editor. But he’s just one man. And, as fan-boy Smith tweeted, “it’s going to break some heart.”
[sigh] Can’t they both lose?
