Go woke, go broke, go home. Multiple sources report that ESPN, the worldwide leader in woke sports, will soon lay off many members of its work force. Nearly every person working at ESPN is vulnerable in the bloodletting to come during the next few weeks.
Believe me, I don’t wish for anyone to get laid off or to lose the ability to provide for their family. However, ESPN made its bed with wokeness and paying exorbitant prices for broadcasting rights. The network chose to pay Stephen A. Smith $12 million for his lefty rants on the First Take program, and even he is said to be susceptible to the looming cuts.
“Hell, for all I know, I might be one of them,” Smith said of the pending layoffs during his K(no)w Mercy podcast. “Now I doubt that. But it’s possible. No one knows.”
Others said to be vulnerable to the massive layoff are late-night SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt and Monday Night Football broadcasters Joe Buck (earning $15 million) and Troy Aikman (earning $18 million). College football mainstay Chris Fowler, the earner of $3 million annually, has not been able to finalize his new contract with ESPN.
Anyone at ESPN earning in the seven-figure range is potentially on the chopping block, wrote Andrew Marchand of the New York Post.
ESPN’s Disney parent company plans to cut 7,000 jobs and $5.5 billion in expenses, CEO Bob Iger announced. No name big or small is regarded as untouchable. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro instructed department heads “to scrutinize their divisions to make them as efficient as possible. Departments were ordered to compile lists of people whose jobs are now seen as “redundant and disposable.”
“At this time, there is no target number for how many millions that ESPN must save or how many employees will be let go, according to sources,” the Post’s report reads.
In recent years, ESPN has lost many subscribers due to cord cutting, but its streaming service subscriptions have steadily risen. ESPN+ has nearly 25 million subscribers, at $10 a pop.
Between 2015 and 2017, ESPN laid off more than 500 employees. In 2020, another 200 positions were let go and 200 more were not renewed. In the last few years, its programming has gotten progressively more and more woke, souring many fans who wanted sports without the left-wing indoctrination.
When it comes to any major issue, ESPN is always on the wrong, woke, radical side. Its broadcasters genuflected to the Marxist group Black Lives Matter, to the NFL’s social justice malarkey, to hysterical and unfounded claims of “systemic racism” and especially to the LGBTQABCD mob. Progressives have the home-field advantage on ESPN, and conservatives have little representation on the network.
The transgender Caitlyn Jenner became an ESPN hero. Homosexual football player Michael Sam was hailed as the new Jackie Robinson and ex-football renegade Colin Kaepernick was labeled by ESPN as the Rosa Parks of football. ESPN published a poem glorifying convicted cop killer Assata Shakur, since removed.
Don’t hold your breath about ESPN or Disney becoming less woke after the layoffs. That characteristic still flows through the organizational bloodstream.
