The latest episode of the culture wars to wash into sports, and the news media that cover it, was prompted (unintentionally) by a broadcaster named Robert Lee. His employer, ESPN, announced Tuesday night that the name he shares with the Confederate general made him a poor choice for calling a University of Virginia football game in Charlottesville, where a recent protest over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee left a woman dead and became part of the national dialogue.
It was a story tailor-made for America’s present hyper-polarized, kinetic and more than slightly absurd moment, and it has left one inescapable conclusion: However many times sports media outlets — and chiefly the biggest of them all, ESPN — are implored to “stick to sports,” the centripetal force of politics is bound to make a battlefield of almost anything.