By now, everyone knows that WFAN host Craig Carton will soon be leaving the station to focus his attention on his daily show on FS1. Dan Le Batard is still kind of surprised to see a national network get behind Carton given his past.
Carton served time in prison for securities and wire fraud, obviously giving up his position with WFAN at the time. But Carton returned to the FAN airwaves in 2020 and has lifted the afternoon drive show back to number one by a large margin, paving the way for FS1 to come calling.
Le Batard thought FOX could’ve done better than to give a push to a convicted felon.
“Addiction grabs human beings and can be difficult,” Le Batard said on a recent edition of The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. “But as it relates to our sorry sad sack, awful industry that employs people – who are largely interchangeable – the idea that FOX would give a convicted felon a promotion when that opportunity would never go in my history doing this, to somebody who isn’t white is such an indictment of everything around me that I find it deeply offensive about our industry.”
Dan said he wanted to be clear he wasn’t ripping on Carton for being a recovering gambling addict. But he felt like the standards for a network looking to push a popular morning show would be much different if it were a person of color convicted of a similar crime.
“It’s just not something that would happen in many other places,” he said. “And it’s not something certainly that would happen when somebody was a convicted felon and not a white person. It’s just not anything that would have any precedent in this business.”
“I don’t know if it bothers the audience at large, but it just speaks so ill of what is our industry,” Le Batard added.
This is not the first time that Le Batard has publicly objected to FS1 being in business with Craig Carton. Upon learning the show existed earlier this year, Le Batard said that “it enrages” him.
