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Tag: Jason Whitlock

Kate Smith ‘God Bless America’ Controversy Sounds a Sour Note

Kate Smith’s stirring recorded rendition of “God Bless America” is now deleted from the playlist at Yankees or Philadelphia Flyers games owing to racism accusations. Smith even sang in person on several occasions during Flyers playoff runs. The NHL team, which considered Smith’s singing, either on tape or in person, its good luck charm, has has even covered over a Smith statute outside the team’s home arena at the Wells Fargo Center. read more

Maybe LeBron James Should Shut Up and Dribble After All: Clay Travis

NBA superstar LeBron James, the self-proclaimed greatest player of all time, made headlines recently by accusing NFL owners of harboring a slave mentality and also sharing anti-Semitic rap lyrics on his Instagram page. FS1 panelist and Fox Sports Radio host Clay Travis says that LBJ benefits from athlete privilege enabled, in large part, by the fawning liberal sports media. Plus, the Lakers luminary himself could be a something of a modern-day slave master for his Nike sneaker deal, Travis argued. read more

Jason Whitlock Rips the LeBron James HBO Show ‘The Shop’ As Fake News

Jason Whitlock probably won’t be appearing on LeBron James’ new “unscripted” TV show The Shop which premiered Tuesday night on HBO.

Set in an apparently mythical barbershop, Whitlock claimed that the NBA superstar who joined the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent made a fool of himself  in something akin to a minstrel show and fake news.

He described the “inauthentic” presentation as a “profane, primitive, and privileged” look inside the fantasy world of black millionaires sipping goblets of wine in an environment which is far removed from reality.

The host of Speak for Yourself, Whitlock is one of the very few commentators in sports journalism, at least on television, who articulates a different view from the groupthink of the politically correct blue-check Twitter cohort.

Watch the FS1 video clips below and draw your own conclusions.

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Dahntay: LeBron's new show "The Shop" was indicative of black barbershops in today's culture. @dahntay1 pic.twitter.com/V74VkCl1PC read more

Did ESPN ‘Get Up’ Tell Michelle Beadle to Get Lost?

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. read more

LeBron James May Run for President, Jason Whitlock Claims

NBA superstar LeBron James bolted Cleveland to sign a free-agent contract with the Los Angeles Lakers to extend his reach as an entertainment mogul and to lay the groundwork for a potential future presidential run.

That is the contention of FS1 Speak for Yourself co-host Jason Whitlock, who described it on the broadcast as a purely political move unrelated to basketball and more for the “media and the money,” suggesting that he has pivoted away from trying to equal or surpass Michael Jordan’s championship legacy.

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As it stands now, and barring injuries, there is no chance that the Lakers can compete with the defending champion Golden State Warriors for the NBA title.

Since Tinseltown is “ground zero for the social justice and race warriors,” left-wing Hollywood executives will become LBJ’s puppet masters as they try to position him as a liberal superhero, Whitlock added.

.@WhitlockJason believes LeBron is no longer chasing Michael Jordan, he's now chasing Muhammad Ali. pic.twitter.com/ceGYXCp2V1 read more

ESPN Reportedly Wastes $20 Million on Failed SportsCenter6 Experiment

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.

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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 read more