Deadspin’s woke spin on sports spells its death
March 13, 2024
Deadspin, the sports blog once owned by Gawker Media and more recently by G/O Media, has laid off its entire staff after being sold to a European startup.
Its folding adds to the toll of the woke pandemic in the media, with the site following fellow recent victims Vice Media and NowThis News along what has become the path from woke to broke, among other outlets that have shuttered or slashed staff this year.
Let’s tread Deadspin’s path together, shall we?
In response to Trump’s election in 2016, Deadspin published the headline, “The Only Thing That Makes The Media Better Is Diversity,” making a golden calf of the diversity, equity and inclusion mandates that had characterized the modern zeitgeist until recently. Prizing competence above all else in the media is racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., just like it is in every industry.
In 2021, noted white man Tom Brady was a superspreader after winning his seventh Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, as AIM reported.
“Put a mask on, Tom Brady,” the Deadspin headline hectored him, scolding the grandma-killer for daring not to wear a mask while celebrating the championship with his teammates.
Like Deadspin, ESPN has gone all the way woke. The worldwide leader in woke sports eats its own, erasing women by propping up the cause of a white, biological man in Lia Thomas. As we wrote, Thomas is the transgender swimmer who cruised past his female competition en route to “smash[ing] NCAA swim records” while receiving “mostly positive coverage” from ESPN.
Outsports – which calls itself “your home for all things LGBTQ+ sports” – took it even further by seeking to “de-platform anyone who suggests that transgender women might have an unfair advantage over their competitors who were born women,” we said.
“Outsports compares those opinions to murder in the same way people say Joe Rogan’s podcast has ‘killed’ people, as was suggested by the Washington Post.”
The legislators behind voter ID laws have blood on their hands as well, as sports commentator J.A. Adande said on ESPN a couple years ago. Adande defended the Beijing Olympics by likening China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims to the United States’ voter integrity laws.
“According to Adande, requiring people to show ID to vote in America is on par with mass genocide,” AIM explained at the time.
ESPN and Deadspin alike have taken cues from LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick and other professional athletes masquerading as political activists while exerting an outsized influence on not only their fans’ politics, but their entire worldviews. Decades before LeBron and his ilk, Michael Jordan set a distinctly apolitical precedent for athletes and sports-adjacent influences with the quote that it is now too late for Deadspin to heed: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”