ESPN’s recent job cuts and plummet in views has sparked up potential reasons why such a renowned company could be hurting. And Caitlyn Jenner comes up as one of the reasons.
The network recently let go 100 of its employees who were a great asset to the company. But after ESPN brought politics into the game, viewers slowly began drifting away.
Rich Greenfield, a media analyst for BTIG, a financial services firm, said in defense of ESPN, “You’re looking at a changing business; that’s the driving factor here.”
However, the network has lost around 12 million subscribers over the course of the past four years.
“ESPN made the mistake of trying to make liberal social media losers happy and as a result lost millions of viewers,” said Clay Travis, who hosts his own national radio show for Fox.
A few instances that back up Travis's opinion of ESPN is when it gave Caitlyn Jenner an Arthur Ashe Courage Award following her coming out as a trans woman and also when the network refused to hold an event near a golf course belonging to Donald Trump.
Kelly McBride, who was part of the ESPN Poynter Review Project from 2011 to 2012, believes that there is a fair balance of politics on the network. Although ESPN gave out a courage award to Caitlyn Jenner, Tim Tebow, an evangelical Christian, was also hired on the network as an analyst which received plenty of coverage.
Media analytics firm, Deep Root, conducted a study where the results showed that politics has indeed affected the viewers.
According to the study, audiences in Cincinnati were vastly Republican in 2015, but in 2016, were Democratic.
In regards to creating a political balance on the network, McBride said, “They could do a better job looking for stories that don’t fall into predictable liberal clichés. But, remember, not every story has two sides.”
See the full story on Politico.com.