If Jason Sehorn knows what ESPN literally stands for, he doesn’t know what it truly stands for.
The former Giants star cornerback who had worked at the Worldwide Leader since 2011, until parting recently, wants to know why he was told to stay away from politics for a network that he feels increasingly allows politics to seep into the broadcast.
Sehorn, who was a college football analyst for ESPNU, spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention on behalf of George W. Bush.
“ESPN stands for Entertainment, Sports, Programming Network. Neither one of these is entertainment or sports,” Sehorn said Thursday on “Fox and Friends,” in response to the Jemele Hill controversy, in which the “SportsCenter” anchor called President Trump a white supremacist on Twitter.
“When I as a fan and a viewer tune into ESPN, I don’t want politics. I don’t want to look at a person and think politics. I understood when they asked me to curtail some of my political aspirations. So when I see it now, it’s like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, you told me one thing and you ran the program one way, and yet here you are completely contradicting yourself.'”
Sehorn, who played from 1994-2002 with the Giants before finishing his career with the Rams, was asked to weigh in after ESPN’s attempt to clean up the public-relations disaster included neither standing by Hill nor publicly disciplining her. Hill expressed regret Wednesday night for including ESPN in the hubbub, though not for the words themselves.
“I want sports when I turn to ESPN and now all of suddenly the lines are getting blurred a little bit,” said the 46-year-old Sehorn. “And I think that’s what they have to clarify more than anything else.”
Hill co-hosts “SC6,” a “SportsCenter” offshoot that allows her more space to give her opinions on a sports world that increasingly intersects with politics. Sehorn was a football analyst more restrained to X’s and O’s.
ESPN has been battling a narrative that the network leans left, allegations fueled by the 2016 firing of Curt Schilling for serially sharing right-wing memes. After Hill said Trump’s rise “is a direct result of white supremacy,” the White House itself called for a firing of an employee at a private institution.
ESPN declined comment on Sehorn’s claims.