New York City sports radio station WFAN (660 AM, 101.99 FM) has retooled its lineup now that afternoon drive host Mike Francesa has retired for the second time. WFAN has the distinction of being the first radio station to adopt the 24/7 sports talk format.
Tag: ESPN
Michelle Beadle will no longer anchor ABC/ESPN’s NBA Countdown and may be out of job entirely on the self-named Worldwide Leader in Sports. As a formerly rising TV star in the sports industry, Beadle is now a three-time loser. She failed as a host on the NBC Sports Network, was essentially told to get lost as host of ESPN’s Get Up, and now she is done on Countdown. This is one case, however, of where someone who got woke doesn’t go broke. She may even collect her massive $5 million annual salary for another year perhaps for just sitting on the couch.
When sanctimonious Get Up co-host Michelle Beadle on Thursday grandstanded/virtue-signalled about no longer watching football in the aftermath of the Urban Meyer scandal, the NFL-centric ESPN obviously had already decided to send her back to Los Angeles (did she keep her apartment and put her furniture in a storage unit?) to increase her role in NBA coverage. She also supposedly leveraged a contract extension out of the schedule reshuffle.
New ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro seems to be trying undo the damage left behind by former “Worldwide Leader” boss John Skipper, who turned the sports network into a tedious, left-wing, social justice platform.
WokeCenter is a disastrous programming strategy — the worst in the nearly forty year history of ESPN. It doesn’t work because WokeSports Twitter isn’t real life. There’s no actual audience for this type of programming.
ESPN put out a press release yesterday boasting that ratings for the 6 p.m. Eastern time edition of the flagship SportsCenter anchored by Sage Steele and Kevin Negandhi are up 19 percent year over year.
In mid May, after a series of fill-ins, Steele and Negandhi officially replaced outspoken Trump foe Jemele Hill and Michael Smith who co-hosted what was then called The Six or SC6, or by its detractors, WokeCenter, for about one year.
With the former duo, the show never gained any traction with sports fans. Hill subsequently left the anchor desk in January to move over to ESPN’s long-form journalism site The Undefeated and has also appeared on various other of the network’s chat shows. Smith departed in February for another assignment but apparently has not been seen on the air since.
“This loud ratings celebration is quite a kick to the face of Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, the two fired hosts who seemed more worried about social justice issues than sports,” Brietbart News observed in the context of the ESPN press release about the current performance of the more traditional SportsCenter as opposed to its WokeCenter incarnation.
SportsCenter at 6 p.m. ET viewership is up!
More: https://t.co/RzRQYOwNYE pic.twitter.com/H2N02YPNYp
— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) June 20, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
ESPN, which is paying the three co-hosts of the tanking Get Up morning show about $15 million, reportedly is on the hook to Hill and Smith for $10 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“Internal discord over the 6 p.m. SportsCenter experiment co-hosted by Jemele Hill and Michael Smith — and yanked after less than a year despite four-year deals worth $10 million each — still lingers.”
ESPN has had several rounds of layoffs, the most recent in November 2017, and has lost millions of subscribers in the past several years for reasons that include pushing a politically correct agenda that turns off viewers who just want to watch games and game highlights.
A source told THR that despite its reputation as a “pinko lefty operation,” many ESPN executives are supposedly conservative. ESPN biographer James Andrew Miller, like many in the sports industry, insisted to THR that there is no causal connection between politics and the disappearing ESPN viewer.
Former ESPN employee Jason Whitlock, the host of Speak for Yourself on FS1, registered disagreement on Twitter, however.
This article completely mischaracterizes ESPN's political problem. No one disputes ESPN has conservative execs. Problem is they have been bullied into silence and uselessness. That's why ESPN's coverage of NFL is so one-sided and unfair. Plus, Jim Miller is an ESPN lobbyist. https://t.co/0sMERKXpP4
ESPN’s much-hyped morning show Get Up (which oddly has an exclamation point in its official title) appears to be a failure to date.
The program backed by an extensive publicity campaign premiered on April 2 as a replacement for the traditional a.m. SportsCenter and has struggled in the ratings since then. It features principal host Mike Greenberg along with co-hosts Michelle Beadle and ex-NBA player Jalen Rose, who broadcast from an expensive new studio in lower Manhattan in New York City rather than from the so-called Worldwide Leader’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn. ESPN is paying the trio about $15 million in combined salary.
To create Get Up, ESPN ended the 18-year, Mike & Mike (Greenberg and Golic) radio/TV simulcast partnership and relocated Beadle from the LA-based SportsNation.
The latest ratings data, revealed by Fox Sports Radio host Clay Travis on his Outkick the Coverage blog, is hardly good news for ESPN execs
“Get Up, aka WokeCenter 2.0, had just 197,000 viewers this past Thursday from 7-10 am eastern, a whopping 33% off the ratings ESPN had for a traditional SportsCenter airing at the same time in the exact same June week last year. SportsCenter, which aired from Bristol and cost a fraction of the $35 million yearly budget of Get Up, had 294,000 viewers last year.
That sounds bad, but later in the day it was even worse.
High Noon, the new PC Bromani and Pablo Torre let’s talk about how much we don’t like sports for an hour but how everything is racist instead show, that debuted a couple of weeks ago at noon eastern, also hit a new series low, posting 193,000 viewers, which was down a whopping 47% over the number of viewers a noon SportsCenter had in the same Thursday time slot last year…
UPDATE: Both shows did worse on Friday of last week, with Get Up posting just 196,000 viewers, compared to 339,000 watching SportsCenter last year, down a massive 42% and High Noon posting just 191,000 viewers, down a whopping 54% from last year’s SportsCenter viewership.”
Self-described “radical moderate” Travis, a longtime ESPN critic, describes the two new offerings, which form part of the legacy of former ESPN President John Skipper, as WokeCenter 2.0 and 3.0 in a reference to the network pushing a far-left, social justice agenda on the sports platform. New president Jimmy Pitaro likely has some difficult decisions ahead with regard to Get Up and High Noon.
Friday’s Get Up & High Noon both set all time low ratings for @espn original programming. https://t.co/J4NfSy8kbY
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 18, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“[B]ased on the numbers for the last two weeks, the show is not growing at all and the patience has to be wearing thin…If the cast stays intact by the start of the NFL season, they’ll most likely remain together until after the Super Bowl, so the next six week or so should be very interesting,” Sports Illustrated added about Get Up.
Watch Clay Travis discuss Get Up and other sports media-related issues on his daily Outkick the Show Periscope broadcast (NSFW).
WokeCenter 2.0 & 3.0 hit all time ESPN ratings low, Harvard discrimination/Ed Werder, State on fire, Jemele on Kell… https://t.co/0ifspr2Q6o
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