Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger recently participated in a conversation with Matthew Belloni of The Hollywood Reporter. Belloni asked Iger about everything from the future plans for the Star Wars franchise to the #MeToo movement’s effect on Pixar to the company’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets.
When the conversation turned to a shakeup at ESPN, Iger noted that he and Jimmy Pitaro, who assumed the role of President of ESPN in March, had his full support. He said they were in agreement over what needed to change at the network.
I have nothing but praise for the job Jimmy Pitaro has done at ESPN. There’s been a big debate about whether ESPN should be focused more on what happens on the field of sport than what happens in terms of where sports is societally or politically. And Jimmy felt that the pendulum may have swung a little bit too far away from the field. And I happen to believe he was right. And it’s something, by the way, that I think John Skipper had come to recognize as well. But Jimmy coming in fresh has had the ability to address it, I think, far more aggressively and effectively. He has brought back some balance.
Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing writes that on its face, Iger’s response seems like an overreaction. Jemele Hill’s tweets about President Trump, which was ESPN’s most high profile instance of not sticking to sports, didn’t even happen on ESPN’s airwaves. It happened on a host’s personal Twitter account. That can hardly be deemed an ESPN problem. He goes on to write that the idea of balance is more important than rolling back any host’s freedom.
But Iger’s pendulum analogy here isn’t a bad one. There is a balance of how much societal or political content should be worked in to straight-up sports talk, some did feel it was too much (even if at its peak, it was still a small fraction of everything ESPN was doing), and they appear to be doing less on that front now without completely eliminating it. Maybe it’s swinging the society/politics balance from five percent down to three percent (we don’t have actual numbers, obviously, but it would be interesting to calculate the total tonnage of comments on anything “away from the field” on ESPN and how that fits in with the massive numbers of comments on things on the field), and maybe Iger and Pitaro’s quest for “some balance” isn’t the wrong approach. And maybe that will help avoid some of the self-inflicted politics disasters, such as the comments ahead of “Get Up” that led to people completely misunderstanding the show, and couldn’t be corrected despite all the efforts to do so.
It should also be noted that Iger remained kind of vague about what ESPN’s policy regarding political and social commentary is now. “He has brought some balance” doesn’t mean that Pitaro has cracked down on anyone that offers an opinion on something that isn’t happening on a football or baseball field. The quote seems only to be an acknowledgement that Iger didn’t like some of the reasons that ESPN found itself in the news last year.
