Jay Maxson
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In her Sunday post on The Atlantic magazine's website, Jemele Hill makes a charge she can't support with the headline "The War on Black Athletes." She claims President Donald Trump is warring on black athletes, but she offers no broad-based arguments in support of her accusation. Hill's post is Part 6 in The Atlantic's "Unthinkable" series, "50 Moments That Define An Improbable Presidency."
This week's engagement of Tim Tebow demonstrated how judgmental media continue dismissing male behavior at both ends of the spectrum. Respectable Christian role models like Vice-president Mike Pence and Tim Tebow are often insulted for upholding honorable standards, right along with the disgraced abusers who spawned the #MeToo movement. While some media responded politely, Tebow's recent engagement also sparked another round of personal attacks by biased media who deem him "polarizing." None more so than from Deadspin's Tom Ley.
Following the end of the 2018 NFL season, left-stream sports media bitterly denounced the dismissal of five of the league's eight African-American head coaches. While these coaches' combined records with their respective teams was an icy cold 21-50-1, J.R. Gamble, of The Shadow League, said NFL owners "eradicated" most of the African-American head coaches this offseason.
Progressives in the sports media are among the strongest advocates of pay for college athletes. The New York Times has advocated for it. So has Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (in an article in The Guardian), and so have Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe of Fox Sports 1. After Monday's national championship football game, USA Today's Nancy Armour suggests the NCAA either gets with the pay for play times or a judge may it do it for the organization that governs university sports in the U.S.
Once again, the ever-restless Jemele Hill is expanding her social justice media reach. After talking her way out the door at ESPN last year, she is now planning to launch a new podcast on Spotify this March, reports Deadline's Dawn C. Chmielewski. Hill's psyched because she gets to curse on Spotify and says she can be even more thoughtful than she's been in the past. Which wouldn't be hard for this social justice lightning rod to do.
Big brash Charles Barkley went "snowflake" on Thursday evening's TNT Inside The NBA program. A discussion of next month's NBA all-star game in Charlotte and whom the fans will vote for starting positions sparked painful memories for Barkley of the 2016 presidential election. He likened his opposition to NBA fan votes to the voter mistake of electing Donald Trump's as president.
Monday night's national championship college football matchup between Clemson and Alabama goes far beyond football. To the USA Today sports staff progressives, it's a matter of red state teams from Alabama and South Carolina invading Hillary Clinton country when they square off at Levi Stadium in California's Santa Clara County.
On Thursday night, UCLA basketball legend and noted leftist Bill Walton (at left in photo) provided color commentary during the ESPN broadcast of the Bruins' first game since Coach Steve Alford was fired Monday. Play-by-play man Dave Pasch asked him who he'd like to see installed as UCLA's new coach, and as Cassandra Negley of Yahoo Sports reports, Walton aimed high in recommending former President Barack Obama.
African-American and progressive white writers are in full gripe mode over this season's firing of five black head coaches in the NFL. The combined records of Denver's Vance Joseph (appearing in photo), Arizona's Steve Wilks, Cincinnati's Marvin Lewis, Cleveland's Hue Jackson and the New York Jets' Todd Bowles was 21 wins, 50 losses and one tie. Records be darned, though, because it's a clear case of racism, and to The Nation's Dave Zirin, the support of President Donald Trump by league owners is also part of the story.
2018 was a Pro Football Hall of Fame induction year for former Baltimore Ravens' linebacker Ray Lewis. But the Awful Announcing blog shamed him for his faith, including him in its year-ender, "This Year In Hot Takes: breaking down the 10 hottest sports takes of 2018."
If they're taking nominations for "sportswriter of the day," the New York Post's Phil Mushnick gets my vote. In a media industry filled with lemmings too politically correct to ever question anything LeBron James says or does, no matter how crude and vulgar, Mushnick is calling out James' for his ignorance on racial matters. Mushnick, who is Jewish, criticized James for insulting Jews and then issuing a non-apology apology.
An LGBTQ media voice renewed the attack on Chick-fil-A this past weekend in the backdrop of Saturday's Peach Bowl college football game. The SB Nation sports blog's LGBTQ extension, Outsports, accused Peach Bowl sponsor Chick-fil-A and its foundation of bringing mental harm to LGBTQ athletes. Writer Cyd Zeigler says the Christian-owned restaurant chain is demeaning LGBTQ people by supporting organizations devoted to God’s design for sexual intimacy through the context of marriage. The story's headline reads Chick-fil-A's participation in sports is a "big F-you to LGBTQ people."
This year basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a presence off the court as a social justice writer and strident opponent of conservatives. He's a contributing editor for the Hollywood Reporter, and in The Guardian Thursday, he selected Serena Williams, gymnast Maggie Nichols and Colin Kaepernick as his athletes of the year because their commitment to sport and society left us better off.
The progressive flag-waving founder of The Young Turks Network says Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign serves as proof that progressives have won the culture wars. He also hopes the former San Francisco quarterback wins enough money in his collusion lawsuit against the NFL to buy a team. Cenk Uygur (appropriately seated at the far left in panel photo) made these declarations on The Young Turks' Thursday Youtube video program, "In 2019 Ban Bill Belichick And Hire Colin Kaepernick."
"Sports fans made it clear in 2018 that they crave stories that go beyond everyday scores and highlights," writes The Sporting News in its recap of the year. Did sports fans really have a choice though? That's assuming an awful lot because woke sports writers and broadcasters are shoving social activism in the fans' faces, glorifying malcontents, obsessing on partisan politics and pushing radical progressive agendas on their audience.
Jet-setting tennis pro Serena Williams, the insulting LeBron James, cop-hater Colin Kaepernick and the gymnasts who exposed former U.S. Olympic coach Larry Nasser are the sports heroes of 2018 — in the progressive view of USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan. The gymnasts are no-doubters; the others are highly questionable.
Newsweek breaking news reporter Benjamin Fearnow covered Wednesday's comments by Rush Limbaugh (see photo) on the criminal justice reform bill that easily passed Congress. Limbaugh claimed the bill steals one of the major issues, prison reform for nonviolent criminals, that Colin Kaepernick and other athletes have been have been demanding through their anthem protests.
In a year-long "season" of print and electronic media sports coverage, American writers and broadcasters have gone way, way, way out of bounds in sensationalistic and unsportsmanlike reporting. Biased progressives shamelessly heaved the ball downfield for leftist causes, frequently "targeting" and "roughing" conservatives along the way. Here's our list of 10 "all-pros" —media whose biting, bigoted, biased quotes rank among the most egregious of 2018. Let the boos begin!
Eric Reid, a safety for the NFL's Carolina Panthers, has been subjected to "random" drug tests seven times in his 11 weeks with the team, and he says it's retaliation for having kneeled for three seasons and for suing the league for alleged collusion. The Root writer Stephen A. Crockett Jr. says the frequent drug tests of the malcontent stem from the NFL's likeness to the Trump Administration. Both are "dictatorships disguised as democracies," he writes.
Born a boy, Andraya Yearwood is of great value to the LGBTQ agenda. So is Mirin Fader, a Bleacher Report writer who uses Yearwood's story to promote transgenderism. In her feature on Yearwood, Fader comes up with excuse after excuse to wiggle out of obvious advantages that males have over women in sports competition.