If Only It Weren't True

On Saturday, the football team of the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville landmark founded by the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, will play a game.  The game is to be against another venerable institution of the Commonwealth, that being the College of William and Mary.

It will be broadcast by ESPN, the granddaddy of all sports networks, which now occupies about a half a dozen separate channels or so on every cable or satellite provider's guide.

Once upon a time, ESPN was respected for its commitment to all things sporting; you knew that there was always something on, that the red-blooded American male would watch.  ESPN launched the careers of many personalities who are now household names, and many legendary calls, even some that grew sickening over the years.  Chris Berman, an original personality over there, was responsible for many terms I hope I never again hear.

Then one day, ESPN became part of the Walt Disney Company.  Disney is the same entity which owns the ABC network, which thinks that George Stephanopoulos is a "journalist" who belongs in that role.  Naturally, in recent years ESPN followed the path of its fellow network and began tilting hard to the leftward direction.

You'll recall that I am not a big fan of ESPN, and occasionally (such as here) take them to task for things like trying to make us be interested in foreign soccer scores we don't care about, and injuries to foreign soccer players we don't care about, and anything else to make us seem part of a global community.  Yes, they are lefties and not particularly American in their orientation.

Which all would have made the joke about the broadcasting of the Virginia-William and Mary game really funny.  What joke was that, you ask?  Why, the one about ESPN pulling an Asian broadcaster named "Robert Lee" from doing the sideline reporting, because his name would be too similar to "Robert E. Lee", and it would have caused trouble in Charlottesville.

Hardy-har-har.

Except for one little thing.  It was, in fact, quite true.  Yes, indeed, as you must know if you watch the right networks (I can't swear that CNN, or ABC, NBC or CBS mentioned it), ESPN actually did pull its commentator Robert Lee from the game, and assigned him elsewhere.  Allegedly, they were concerned about seeming "insensitive" by sending someone with that name to the game.

Even though, as you can tell, Robert Lee is quite Asian, obviously not descended from the Lees of Old Virginia, and this is a football game.  Pardon my insensitivity.

So let's think of the mindset that went into this.  Someone inside the ESPN bowels noticed that the name of their assigned commentator resembled that of the distinguished USA and Confederate general (he served both brilliantly) whose statue, in the town of the university of his beloved state, was causing the hard-left class a lot of angst they apparently had not noticed until this month.

What, he or she asked, should we do?  Either we'll get some odd tweets here at ESPN, laughing at us for the juxtaposition of the names, or we send him to another game and no one will be the wiser.  And they chose the latter course, which would have been fine -- except someone inside was appropriately disgusted and tipped off a media type who is a big critic of ESPN's leftishness.

Now, if I were the head of ESPN, I would have said in the first place that even leftists have to be given boundaries, and if we here at the network thought Robert Lee should do the Virginia game, then send Robert Lee to the Virginia game -- let the problem be the critics' issue, not ours.  I would have thought the risk of being ridiculed for acute over-sensitivity to snowflakes was far too great.

But they moved him, the word got out, and now ESPN is getting accusations of stupidity heaped on their stupid heads for doing something that, well, stupid.  How many times in the last day and a half have commentators included in their criticism of ESPN the idea that "this story could have been in The Onion."

And still there are no boundaries.  ESPN will not budge from their leftism even though they are now the subject of immense ridicule.  They will not apologize; they will continue to give fumbling rationalizations for something they did because they thought they would not be caught.

And we will set back, shake our heads, and cancel our subscriptions to their Magazine, as we look at their advertisers and take pity on them.

But I swear that they would move Robert Lee to another game if this happened tomorrow.  Leftists, despite their being all over colleges, still cannot learn.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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