There aren’t many open conservatives at left-wing sports network ESPN.
One host’s experience shows why.
And a Super Bowl champion insulted this pro-Trump ESPN host in one awful way.
Ryan Clark admits he didn’t want to work with Sage Steele
Sage Steele was one of the few outspoken conservatives in the sports media landscape.
Social media exposed the fact that the sports media is even more left-wing than the political media.
ESPN NFL analyst Ryan Clark is one of those leftists.
Clark played for 13 years in the league and won a Super Bowl title with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008.
Sage Steele sued ESPN in 2022 after the network took her off the air in 2021 following comments made on former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler’s podcast where she opposed the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and criticized how Barack Obama dealt with race.
In the lawsuit, Steele alleged Clark refused to go on set with her due to her political beliefs.
Clark appeared on former NBC Sunday Night football reporter Michelle Tafoya’s podcast and confirmed that detail.
“No, so that part of her lawsuit wasn’t false,” Clark admitted. “Now, in truth, I have worked — or I did work with Sage after that. So, that is false in the sense that we never worked together after her Jay Cutler appearance. But, what did happen was I had no issue with Sage Steele being a conservative. I had no issue with Sage Steele’s vaccination stance . . . Sage Steele being a conservative was like the worst-kept secret at ESPN,” Clark stated.
Clark said he took issue with Steele’s comments about Barack Obama and asked for cohost Matt Barrie to question him during an upcoming SportsCenter segment.
“And what I told the producer that day, Michelle, was, ‘Hey, would it be possible if Matt Barrie was to ask me my questions?’If he was able to conduct my segment,” Clark added. “Because what I know is this . . . chemistry is a large part of TV. It’s a large part of our ability to be able to entertain. And I didn’t want my discomfort with what she said to show on screen.”
Producers refused saying they would have to tell Steele what was going on and so Clark refused to go on the air.
In the podcast with Jay Cutler, Steele took issue with Obama erasing his white mother from his biography.
“I’m like, ‘Well, congratulations to the president. That’s his thing.’ I think that’s fascinating considering his Black dad was nowhere to be found, but his White mom and grandma raised him, but hey, you do you. I’m going to do me,” Steele stated.
Clark is clearly a huge fan of Obama and a big-time Trump hater.
In a video posted to social media following the election, Clark ranted that Obama held the office of the President with grace and attacked Donald Trump as a multiple-time impeached convicted felon.
“It started when we wanted to make America great again, but wasn’t it before? I felt it was the greatest it had ever been,” Clark fumed. “For eight years, President Obama represented us with class and with grace and with elegance and with decency. There were no scandals. There were no impeachments. There were no felony charges. There were no indictments. There were none of these things that were unbecoming of the office. And we elected someone who ran a campaign based on bigotry and based on hate. And for those four years, it wasn’t great.”
That led to Clark declaring that he would never show respect to Trump the man even if he would respect the office of the President.
“I think now the difficult part is I do understand that not everyone that supports him believes in his rhetoric and everyone that supports him thinks bigotry is OK,” Clark said. “They told me that he believes in Christian values . . . For me, I’ll give him that grace because I do want salvation for all people. It’s going to be forever hard to respect the man – and I don’t and I won’t. But I will respect the office,” Clark concluded.
