ESPN

Almost to a team, this week’s conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is seen as a mandate to double down on social justice activism. USA Today said the verdict was centuries in the making. Sports Illustrated saw the world breathing a sigh of relief.

Legendary baseball writer Peter Gammons earned his way into the Hall of Shame Friday by calling Georgia’s Republican governor a KKK member. Gov. Brian Kemp signed election reform into law in March, prompting an insidious backlash and Major League Baseball to pull this year’s All-Star Game out of the Peach State.

So much for a commitment to the truth. On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Norah O’Donnell and White House correspondent Nancy Cordes refused fact-check or pushback on President Joe Biden’s insistence that Georgia’s new election law is “Jim Crow on steroids.” In other words, Cordes and O’Donnell chose to cater to Stacey Abrams as their far-left overlord than even call out Biden’s…

President Joe Biden won’t go to the southern border to see the mess he’s made of things down there. He does, however, have time to spend talking sports with ESPN. He spoke on SportsCenter with Sage Steele Wednesday on the topics of Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in Georgia, fan attendance amid the pandemic and pay for women’s soccer players. Truly bad optics considering the state of the…

Some things are thoroughly rotten with media coverage of March Madness and Major League Baseball this spring. New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick exposed television networks airing these respective sports for celebrating cheating coaches and athletes.

Get used to it. Any hiring of a white guy to serve as head coach of an NBA team is going to be met with derision and cries of white privilege by race-baiting media and players. It happened a few months ago when Steve Nash was hired to coach Brooklyn, and it’s happening again this week after Minnesota hired Chris Finch, who is white.

Though he’s overshadowed by the better known social justice warriors of the NBA and NFL, New Orleans Pelicans coach Stan Van Gundy is way out there on the far Left fringe. In an interview with ESPN’s black-themed blog, The Undefeated, the veteran NBA coach proudly claimed the mantle of poster boy for white privilege.

In an Undefeated feature story on Philadelphia 76ers coach Doc Rivers, author Roger Reeves slammed America as a nation that prefers its African Americans dead in this “killing season.” Rivers is labeled anti-American, but only in the spirit of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Cong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for regarding the nation as one that peddles a lie of freedom to the world.

Having exorcised the White house of the demon Trump, 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.

Though few believe it, ESPN swears that it’s not a political network. Many of its personalities just happen to hate conservatives. Keith Olbermann and former SportsCenter co-host Jemele Hill are legendary among them, and a few days ago, ESPN’s Domonique Foxworth bashed the Buffalo Bills’ quarterback Josh Allen and his American flag- and dog-loving fans.

Any way you look at it -- and judging from the ratings, you haven’t looked at it -- 2020 has been a disaster for spectator sports. Covid interrupted or delayed all the major professional sports for long months, and when they did resume, they were made unwatchable by Black Lives Matter antics. Even an excellent World Series won by a major-market franchise drew 32% fewer viewers than last year…

In the week leading up to the elections, ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro earned a big Pinocchio. He keeps saying his organization is not political, but his nose keeps growing longer and longer. "We are not a political organization," Pitaro has said in the past, but the network website currently features a six-part series on -- you guessed it -- politics.

The NBA could only take a pelting so long before it had the good sense to come in out of the rain. Commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN's NBA Countdown it will back off the on-court social justice messaging next season.

Taking a page out of the Kyle Korver I'm white, privileged and sorry book, the Miami Heat's Meyers Leonard tells The Undefeated sports blog's Marc J. Spears why he stands for the national anthem and also gets down with the Black Lives Matter movement. He says he's trying to be a good white boy by listening and educating himself and clueless folks back home on the farm about the effects of…