The Twisted Unreality of Sports TV in the Time of Insurrection

Sports mean very little right now, but you'd never know it if you tuned into the right channels.

Wednesday, January 6th, 2021. Sentient Cheeto Dust holds a rally in front of the White House, where he incites his followers to ransack the Capitol, as both houses of Congress are about to certify that he had lost the presidential election. His followers then storm a building that had not been breached by a hostile force in 207 years. His followers are members and allies of white supremacist organizations, adorned in racist and anti-semitic symbols. The Confederate battle flag flies in the Capitol rotunda, something that didn’t even occur during the Civil War. Rumors of Nazi flags abound. Five people, including a Capitol Police officer, die. A massive national security breach may have occurred.

This act of sedition had been fomented by Sentient Cheeto Dust and his acolytes for weeks. The breaching of the Capitol walls resulted from the combined incompetence and malicious complicity of the U.S. Capitol Police, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and most importantly, Sentient Cheeto Dust himself.

There was no room for nuance: Sentient Cheeto Dust had incited an insurrection for the purposes of an autogolpe. It was the most direct attack on American democracy in living memory, all in the name of a conspiracy theory that Sentient Cheeto Dust had the election stolen from him. Hardly any arrests were made on the Capitol grounds. Without immediate impeachment and removal, Sentient Cheeto Dust will face no consequences for his criminal acts. Ditto his lackeys like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and dozens of others who helped egg the terrorists on.

This all cements the ignominy of January 6th, which now joins the long list of dark days in American history, one in which the very foundations of the American experiment come into doubt.

That is, unless you watch sports TV.

MLB Network went live Wednesday evening with their flagship program, MLB Tonight—the very moment when the terrorists were finally removed from the Capitol by the DC National Guard. Without even an acknowledgment of the day’s events, host Fran Charles and panelists Dan Plesac and Tom Verducci launched into some banter about Blake Treinen’s new contract with the Dodgers.

Meanwhile, over on ESPN, host Mike Greenberg offered some pablum about sports being an escape from reality, and proceeded to run his show as he normally would. I can’t speak to what was going on over on FS1, but one does sense a trend here.

We have experienced a version of this alternate media reality since July, when professional men’s sports returned to the airwaves. Networks bent over backwards to avoid characterizing the COVID-19 pandemic as the existential threat it was, instead reframing it as an obstacle to overcome, like any other personal or teamwide adversity. Things were a little weird, but the escape of sports from the messiness of life was paramount.

We know why they approached their coverage thusly. Many producers, executives, and on-air talent actually believed that fiction. Many more wanted to keep a steady hand at the till, perhaps convinced that the viewers who didn’t have a problem with players and fans getting sick were the loudest and most important voices to the advertisers. The leagues and teams certainly held that line, and access is too important to the networks to rock the boat.

We’re going through it again. This current iteration may seem less critical for sports media to acknowledge upon first blush, but it is in some ways more insidious. I experienced whiplash on Wednesday night, flipping from MSNBC—where cameras showed men and women in MAGA and pro-Holocaust gear smashing the doors of the Senate chamber—to MLB Network, where Tom Verducci was super excited to break down Robbie Grossman’s value to the Tigers in the coming season. All major broadcast networks preempted their primetime lineups to cover the insurrection. CNN didn’t take a commercial break for hours. If SportsCenter dared make mention of the real world instead of going through the Browns’ playoff lineup, the fantasy would have crumbled.

The obvious retort is that none of these outlets have anything to do with politics as they are commonly understood. “Stick to sports” is the common refrain whenever the wider world steps between the white lines. “Evan, the network literally has MLB in its name. Do you honestly expect them to talk about whatever that mess was in DC?”

Somehow, the twin rots of the pandemic and George Floyd’s lynching last summer were afforded at least some attention by sports television. Both affected the actual games in tangible ways that were impossible to completely ignore. Players demanded that it were so. So it was on Wednesday, when the Celtics walked off the court and Jaylen Brown had this to say:

Per usual, the NBA has led the way in men’s sports on the effects of politics in their game. Brown has the clarity of mind to understand what Wednesday’s acts of sedition portend for the nation as a whole.

A sport like baseball has no such clarity. Its fans are predominantly older, conservative, cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male, and those who don’t fit most of that profile aren’t listened to as fans. The sedition at the Capitol was to preserve and protect the power of the very demographic that dominates the consumption of baseball. Why would they have any interest in hearing anything negative about an act that intends to address their grievances?

The players won’t force such a Jaylen Brown-like conversation, either. The number of MAGA chuds in Major League uniforms is disturbing. Black players, vastly outnumbered thanks to the structural racism embedded in the sport’s entire history, are left with minimal leverage, and despite the noble actions of the Players Alliance, most feel compelled to keep their political opinions to themselves—or to neuter the expression of those opinions practically out of existence.

Sports TV, no matter its purported good intentions to provide an escape from the real world, can henceforth only look more and more disconnected from reality, considering that reality involves the beginning of the possible end of American government. But sports TV mostly serves the very people whose livelihoods will not be interrupted by the erasure of little old democracy. After all, cis het white men have never faced the sustained inhumanities of disenfranchisement, redlining, the education gap, workplace discrimination, food deserts, violent intimidation, the prison industrial complex, rape as a political weapon, and state sanctioned murder at the hands of the police. If Josh Hawley got his way, most of those in baseball would barely have their feathers ruffled.

TV channels like MLB Network and ESPN might consider it self-evident that their sandbox is separate from a coup attempt in the halls of Congress. But should those networks do so, they risk appealing solely to a very loud, very toxic group of people, a group that has disavowed reality—and it will be clear that the bottom line overrules the acknowledgment of the dangers to the republic. Bomani Jones entreated those who work in sports media to remember the utterly abnormal moment in which we are currently living:

“If you think [Wednesday was just [Wednesday], I’ve got bad news for you. Please come up with a plan for how you all want to handle this, because we’re not going to be able to bury our heads and ignore this for very long. It’s just not going to be possible.”

Do not try to do the impossible. Otherwise, you will be on record implicitly claiming that Blake Treinen’s fastball supersedes and exists outside of the potential collapse of the nation. If you do, your sport will mean very little indeed.