ESPN's Dan Le Batard slams the sports network's stick-to-sports rules in denouncing Trump's “instigation of racial division"

Deadspin

ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro arrived last year with a mandate to have ESPN personalities avoid politics after the Jemele Hill debacle. But Le Batard wasn't having any of it in the wake of President Trump's anti-U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar rally on Wednesday night. “We here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight, because Jemele did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that, and then here all of a sudden nobody talks politics on anything unless we can use one of these sports figures as a meat-shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects," Le Betard said on his ESPN show, according to Deadspin. "The only way we can discuss it around here—because this isn’t about politics, it’s about race; what you’re seeing happening around here is about race and it’s been turned into politics—we only talk about it around here when Steve Kerr or (Gregg) Popovich says something. We don’t talk about what is happening unless there’s some sort of weak, cowardly sports angle that we can run it through, when sports has always been a place where this stuff changes. We won’t talk about it unless Russell Wilson is saying something about it on his Instagram page. Then we have the power to run with it. Weak-as** shield. It is antithetical to what we should be, and if you’re not calling it abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric, you’re complicit.”