The final confrontation occurred in November, after ESPN laid off 300 employees, including Chris Cote, a producer on Le Batard’s radio show. Le Batard rehired Cote, paying the producer’s salary out of his own pocket, and said on-air that the layoff was “the greatest disrespect of my professional career, that I got no notice, no collaboration.”

The layoff followed a number of decisions that diminished Le Batard’s reach. The television simulcast of his radio show was recently moved from the cable channel ESPNews to the streaming platform ESPN+, which has tens of millions of fewer subscribers. ESPN Radio also reduced the hours that it carried Le Batard’s radio show, from three daily to two.

The relationship between Le Batard and ESPN was always challenging. He was known for gags that tested the humor of his bosses: The network suspended him for two days in 2014 after he commissioned billboards, and also planned to hire a plane flying a banner, to mock LeBron James’s decision to leave the Miami Heat and return to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

A more serious conflict surfaced in the summer of 2019. Le Batard publicly criticized ESPN’s tepid approach to covering politics after President Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came” — comments that even members of Trump’s party condemned as racist.

Le Batard said on his radio show that “we here at ESPN don’t have the stomach for the fight.”

“We don’t talk about what is happening unless there is some sort of weak, cowardly sports angle that we can run it through,” he added. Afterward, he was summoned to New York for a meeting with ESPN’s president, Jimmy Pitaro.

Source: New York Times

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