Battles between ESPN and WFAN are nothing new, but the latest feud features a new antagonist as Jeff Passan and Craig Carton exchange punches.
During the opening of his Wednesday afternoon show with co-host Evan Roberts, Carton said Passan is now “public enemy number one. And that’s a bad spot for him to be in – that whiny little weasel.”
On Tuesday, Passan joined ESPN New York’s The Michael Kay Show to discuss the bombshell report he co-wrote with Mina Kimes, which detailed a sexual harassment incident by Mets general manager Jared Porter.
Passan’s first order of business in the interview was to chastise 98.7 ESPN New York’s competition, and the local radio station he used to frequent, WFAN.
“There’s another radio station in New York that’s been pretty damn irresponsible today about its coverage of this. And I hate giving them any shine because they don’t deserve it, but the notion that ESPN has been sitting on this story since 2017 is the most giant load of irresponsible garbage that I’ve heard in a longtime,” Passan said to open the interview.
To clarify, ESPN did receive the information in 2017, but Passan doesn’t believe that means they were “sitting” on the story for four years.
“We have duties as journalists to protect our sources,” Passan continued. “And to look after the people that give us the stories that we get to tell. It is their story, it is not ours.”
Passan’s rant was an obvious shot at Carton and Roberts, and the way they covered ESPN’s damning report on Jared Porter. While Carton did say the timing of ESPN releasing the story was an interesting layer to the overall incident, he also defended their decision.
“ESPN does not have a responsibility to report [the story] when you want it to be reported,” Carton said during the first segment of WFAN’s afternoon show on Tuesday.
Carton also did not dispute the validity of the victim being uncomfortable with ESPN running the story at any point in recent years. But what Carton did state is that he doesn’t believe ESPN was looking to protect the journalist.
“They called her. They brought her back into her worst nightmare, having to deal with the reality of her stalker,” Carton said. “Let’s not act like they give a rat’s ass about the victim, because they don’t.”
According to Passan, he was unaware of the information ESPN held on Porter, it was a report his colleague Mina Kimes was working on and he was only briefed recently. We don’t know when Passan was clued in on the information, but we do know he was very complimentary of Porter when the Mets hired him, which would signal hypocrisy if the MLB Insider was already aware of the new general manager’s past.
If Passan did only learn of the damning information in recent weeks, why was he attached as an equal contributor to a story that Kimes had been working on since 2017? “Some may call that sexist,” Carton wrote of ESPN’s decision to make Passan the front man of a story a female reporter spent years working on.
Carton invited Passan to join WFAN’s afternoon show, he also offered to go on ESPN to discuss the MLB Insider’s claim of prioritizing the victim over the story. Passan used to frequent WFAN when he was a columnist with Yahoo Sports, but that came to an end once he joined ESPN in 2019.
Brandon Contes is a former reporter for BSM, now working for Awful Announcing. You can find him on Twitter @BrandonContes or reach him by email at Brandon.Contes@gmail.com.
I don’t believe Passan for one damn second. This is exactly the type of thing I come to expect from journalists of any stripe in this country. They knew full well that this man was on a trajectory to become a GM. They waited until it happened, even going so far as to encourage his hiring just so they could pounce. This was a set up and timed out hit piece, plain and simple. Good on Craig Carton for calling this putrid crap out