Dan LeBatard keeps his ESPN job despite assailing President Trump
Updated, Thursday, July 25, 2019
Dan LeBatard is arguably the most important media voice in Florida. As a Spanish voice, he represents an ethnic group that accounts for 18.2% of the national population. His parents were born in Cuba. They fled to the USA because they wanted to live in a country that values, above all other values, freedom of speech.
It could be in his DNA to protest a President who advocates expelling dark-skinned immigrants and second-generation dark-skinned Americans who criticize his policies. LeBatard, born in New Jersey, has pale skin and a French surname that translates to “The Bastard.” Perhaps Donald Trump can work a tweet out of that.
I met LeBatard in the 1990s when we were newspaper reporters covering Major League Baseball. I was impressed with his perceptiveness and wit and his fluency in two languages. He’d flow through the clubhouse, joking with the players, even more easily with the Latin ones than with the whiter Americans.
He now earns millions a year sharing his knowledge and opinions on ESPN, both television and radio. Dan is not a loose-cannon showboat like Colin Cowherd or Skip Bayless but usually is light-hearted and even-handed. So I was as shocked as anyone with his Thursday morning takedown of a Trump Rally in North Carolina.
A couple of ESPN cohorts nodded, but never spoke, as he ranted for four minutes. Highlights: “What happened last night felt un-American, basically a chant, ‘Send her back.’ It’s not the America that my parents came here to get for us. . . . There’s a racial division in this country that’s being instigated by the President.”
LeBatard knew he was defying the president, not only of the USA but of ESPN. Jimmy Pitaro has a no-politics rule for his commentators. As did his predecessor, John Skipper, who suspended Jemele Hill and later ushered her from the company not for what she said on air but for tweeting against Trump.
LeBatard emerged with his job and no suspension after meeting with Pitaro in New York on Thursday, one week after the outburst. No word on what sort of understanding was reached, only that there was one.
You have to think they debated whether the audience needs to know what a sports reporter thinks of a real estate mogul who’s the leader of the free world. Isn’t that why we have Morning Joe and Chuck Todd?
According to Ben Strauss, pollster for The Washington Post, 74% of ESPN’s audience does not want politics on the network.
LeBatard, 50, took a similar path as Colin Kaepernick, who defied the President by not standing for the national anthem. Kaepernick was appalled by young black men dying by the dozens from police bullets. He decided to protest, even if it cost him his career. It did, in fact.
Like the former San Francisco quarterback, LeBatard has risked a career because he can afford to do his part to obstruct an admirer of Mussolini who believes Vladimir Putin is more credible than the CIA.
Perhaps LeBatard’s hand was strengthened – or maybe not — by Special Counsel Robert Mueller appearing before the House of Representatives.
Mueller, though appearing as confident as a condemned criminal, said he would have indicted Trump if not for the counsel’s belief – not shared by all legal scholars — that a sitting President has extra-constitutional protections not afforded the rest of us.
Like Kaepernick at times, LeBatard hasn’t been entirely heroic. He disrespected his superiors, saying they “haven’t had the stomach for the fight because Jamele did some things on Twitter, and you saw what happened after that.” The company (meaning Pitaro) is “cowardly” for banning political discussion “unless we can use some sports figure as a meat shield. . . . We only talk about it around here when Steve Kerr or (Gregg) Popovich says something.”
LeBatard could have delivered his message the way Pitaro wanted: on the “meat shield.” He could have found an athlete or coach to express the viewpoint he wanted on Trump. But he couldn’t be sure exactly what they’d say.
This way he knew his point would be made to the masses who are missing it.
From a journalistic and historic perspective, it’s important to know if LeBatard is right or wrong about Trump. I’m interested in what the most reasonable and knowledgeable people believe. One such authority is Rick Wilson, who’s strategized numerous Republican campaigns and appeared recently on Book TV.
“If he’s re-elected,” Wilson warned, “you’re going to have a generation of kids who have spent eight years of their formative lives hearing that it’s OK to kill journalists; it’s funny when people die in a ditch; it’s OK to put children in cages; it’s OK to mock the disabled.
“It’s going to lead our country to a long horrible stretch where society doesn’t have any mechanism to fight back against it. As a conservative, I think the only thing that’s adequate to the task is his humiliating defeat and later imprisonment. He’s the Joker; he likes the chaos, the nihilism.”
Not to put words into Dan LeBatard’s mouth, but I’m guessing his position is close to Rick Wilson’s. I’m also guessing you won’t hear any more from him on the subject.
